Avogrenades
How to generate good ideas
By no means am I any scientist BUT I’ve done my fair share or research and reading into creativity that I think I have a solid stance on it. I hope I don’t seem like I’m just regurgitating information but truly give you perspective on how I practice creativity.
Be a kid again
I don’t know about you but when I was a kid I WAS SO CRING—CREATIVE. I’d be in Costco looking at people through shelves thinking I was in a war battle and chucking avocado grenades at them whenever we made eye contact. Or if I was in the car, I’d imagine in other passing cars that they had laser guns… yeah I was weird.
But you see how if I did that as an adult, I’d probably get some even weirder looks, yet when I was a kid, I mean people would laugh but it was just a kid being a kid. At that age, I didn’t think society would view me weirdly, I was just being myself—being raw—being creative.
When we let society dampen our perspective on socially acceptable things, we stop ourselves short from coming up with ideas that are outside of the box. See its a dilemma: we’ve been taught NOT to do things that society deems as strange. Yet, if we want to come up with novel ideas, we have to think in a way that society doesn’t. It’s a true contradiction! So its something that we have to be able to practice.
Obviously I’m not telling you to start laser gunning people in the aisle, but what I’m saying is to come up unashamedly with ideas and not shut them down so quickly just “because its dumb“. Who told you it was dumb? The thought had never left your mind. So let yourself be unfiltered and laugh at the funny things you come up with.
Constraints push resourcefulness
Reversely, when we set rules for what we want to create, it forces our brains to think outside the box. For example, I love tech. But when I come up with solutions to problems I want to solve, I force myself to imagine different situations:
What if the users didn’t have any technology?
Or my tool should take less than 30 seconds to solve their problem
Or this person has no electricity
Or half of our users can’t speak English
ect. (constraints that would make your idea pretty much infeasible)
This forces your brain to think outside of the box because there literally is no other way.
Example:
Problem: lots of lonely nursing mothers who want to find other moms in the area
Initial Idea: app that connects nursing moms together
but its hard to market this
Constraint: your solution can’t use the internet
Thoughts: “hm ok what if i printed flyers… but then how would i know who to give it to? hm where do moms always go? OH THEY NEED TO GO BUY DIAPERS! what if i just put the flyers in the diapers section“
Solution: print flyers for a nursing moms meet up every Saturday morning at that grocery store since they go there anyways to get groceries
The science ish
Default Mode Network — the part of your brain that can’t shut off.
Try this with me, when you read each word imagine in your mind the first image that comes to head.
chicken
lambo
basketball
wallet
6-7
math
Everyone most definitely thought of a different image. That’s part of our uniqueness and this applies to problem solving too — not just images.
So when you come up with ideas, this is your DMN firing. In my opinion this process is not about coming up with ideas, bur rather, letting the ideas come to you.
I’ve also found it helpful to have different mediums for coming up with ideas. Why only think about them? How about writing them down. Drawing them. Singing them. Dancing them. I really use my fullness of human expression to explore connections from my past experiences to the current problems I’m facing.
I like to visualize our brains like trillions of nodes of past experiences in our minds. And when we encounter something new, edges are being formed between these nodes that generate more nodes. And by creating these nodes in different ways, it actually opens us up to more possibilities — the weirder the better.
Executive Control Network — Now there are dumb ideas
This is the part of your brain that actually critically thinks and evaluates ideas. Now look over your list of notes, drawings, voice memos and really think about the implications of the ideas. Ask the what if’s. Apply the constraints. Come up with more ideas. The process of coming up with ideas and being creative is like a back and forth dance between shamelessness and critical thinking.
The more you do it, the better you get at it. Creativity is in of itself an art form. Expressing that creativity is another skill that I also am honing right now.
closing thoughts
creativity is something uniquely human (for now). its something i think we should workout as much as our health. without creativity, we are just machines doing the same things over and over again.