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Coming up with ideas is one the hardest things to do . . Unlike other more ‘cumulative’ work where you know what you will reap if you sow X amount of hours, ideas come and go without warning or time limits. Many a time I have sat down, sketch pad and freshly sharpened 2B in hand, only to find my mind wandering to shoddy second rate thoughtstarters and half formed shopping lists…
Even the most creative people find it difficult to come up with ideas day after day – whether it’s new product ideas or brand narratives, design ideas, the perfect copy or content – getting your neurons firing can be frustrating, especially on those days when your brain inconveniently turns itself off, so I thought I’d share with you a bunch of tricks I use to get the juices going…
Brainstorm in front of the TV
The more ideas you come up with the better. Plus, once you get all the crap predictable ideas out of your head, you’re more likely to come up with a cracker. There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank sheet of paper so I sit & watch TV and try and come up with an idea during every ad break. At the very least, at the end of my favourite show, I’ve got 8 or so crap ideas to get me started. Unless you’re watching the ABC…
Surf the net & steal like an artist
There’s an old blog I used to love called ‘Talent imitates Genius steals’ that sparked a new way of approaching brainstorming and idea generation for me. I like to think that there’s nothing wrong with ‘adapting’ an idea from another category, giving it a bit of a make over and dropping it onto your own workbook. After all, a good idea is a good idea no matter where it came from. Surf the net & just let your mind wander . . . sometimes you can see the dots but it just takes you a while to join ’em. This can be especially fruitful if you take an idea from a completely unrelated category and apply it to your challenge.
Re-express the problem
If you can pare your problem back & look at the key issue, then re-express the problem in new language to give you a jump start. If you’re trying to think of acquisition ideas, start thinking about things similar to acquisition . . If acquisition is about getting people to join the party or the Telco service or the banking group, then re-express the issue. How do cult members get members to join? How does the church recruit people? How do we woo our partners? What does it mean to commit?
Use Idea Springboards
A bunch of techniques for when you really get stuck for ideas – I just pick a card one by one and force myself to bash out a couple before I move to the next one.
Look for opposites
This is an easy one. What would happen if you took your problem to the extreme? What would happen if you made it the most expensive member donation on the market? or the cheapest? What if you went after the smallest target group? Or what if you appealed to everyone? What if you created a way for people to feel good publicly about supporting you? What might that look like?
What’s your favourite brainstorming exercise? What gets your juices flowing? Put together your own list of creative springboards that might be useful when you get stuck staring at a blank sheet of paper.
<aside> ⚡ Talent imitates Genius steals
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Creativity is like anything. We get better with practice. We also incidentally, get better and picking the stinkers from the showstoppers. Everyone’s been in a situation where they’ve come up with what they think are some good ideas, only to have them stamped on or suffocated by somebody else. We’ve all been there and most of us have probably been the stomper at one point or another. The point is, just because you have the idea doesn’t make it great, we all have good ideas and we all have stinkers. The more ideas you have, the more you’re likely to come across a showstopper. What’s the answer? have more! Do more. Be less precious and less personal and just do more of it to increase the chances.
Creativity and brainstorming ideas always reminds me of small people. Small people can’t wait to come up and show you their drawing or something they’ve made at school. Even if it is difficult to recognise or completely aesthetically challenged it doesn’t occur to them that you won’t like it. And I’m sure even if you didn’t, they wouldn’t be crushed and go home and reconsider the meaning of life and whether this is the right path for them or whether it’s a sign of some bigger dysfunction in their lives. No they’d pretty much just make another. They’d try something else. Use crayons instead of textas. Use more glitter and put more sequins. They’d just do something else because at the end of the day (although they don’t consciously realise it), they don’t need to be precious about their work because there’s plenty more where that came from. Their little minds are bursting with fruit flavour and if you don’t like one, stuff you they’ll just keep going until you do.
📌 Playing on this idea of quantity not just quality being good for creativity, check out Dominic Wilcox’s latest project > 30-day creation challenge