Can’t draw? That’s OK. Symbols and stick figures work well. This article Hand-Sketching: Things You Didn’t Know Your Doodles Could Accomplish encourages hand-sketching to externalize your ideas. Try it. Many creative people doodle, often without realizing that they’re doing it. You can doodle deliberately to generate fresh ideas from combinations of ideas.
The simplest, and yet the best way to generate great ideas is to generate LOTS of ideas. Out of quantity comes quality. Pick a topic each day. Then, generate ten ideas on that topic, off the top of your head. Don’t think about it too much. Just make a list from one to ten, then jot down your ideas. Keep all your ideas. You’ll be amazed at the results. We’re all creative. Sadly, mostly we ignore our creative intuitions. When you set out to deliberately generate a flow of ideas each day, you’ll strengthen your idea-generation muscles.
If you tried to write down all 50,000 thoughts that enter your mind every day, you’d never get anything done. After you have your recording devices in place, you need to decide what’s worth remembering. Most of your thoughts are just mental chatter, but there will be a few gems worth noting. Write down any thought that breaks from traditional thinking. If it’s different from the way most people approach a topic, you may want to remember it.
Catching the Aha Moment
If you sit down with the intention of forcing ideas out of your head, you probably won’t succeed. You can’t pull out a notebook and expect your brain to deliver the same types of thoughts you had in diffused mode. . . . Instead of staring at a blank page, the key is to do something else. Go for a walk, or have a cup of coffee. Choose something that requires minimal mental or physical effort. Keep a recording tool, such as your notebook, with you but out of sight. As long as your notebook is out of sight but within reach, you’ll free your brain from its focused stat.
A person has an average of 50,000 thoughts per day]. That’s an impressive number that should translate into an abundance of ideas. Now, sit down and try to recall what you’ve thought about today.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. ~ Charles Mingus
The Three Hermits
William Butler Yeats
Three old hermits took the air
By a cold and desolate sea,
First was muttering a prayer,
Second rummaged for a flea;
On a windy stone, the third,
Giddy with his hundredth year,
Sang unnoticed like a bird.
'Though the Door of Death is near
And what waits behind the door,
Three times in a single day
I, though upright on the shore,
Fall asleep when I should pray.'
So the first but now the second,
'We're but given what we have earned
When all thoughts and deeds are reckoned,
So it's plain to be discerned
That the shades of holy men,
Who have failed being weak of will,
Pass the Door of Birth again,
And are plagued by crowds, until
They've the passion to escape.'
Moaned the other, 'They are thrown
Into some most fearful shape.'
But the second mocked his moan:
'They are not changed to anything,
Having loved God once, but maybe,
To a poet or a king
Or a witty lovely lady.'
While he'd rummaged rags and hair,
Caught and cracked his flea, the third,
Giddy with his hundredth year
Sang unnoticed like a bird.
The Great Way has no gate;
there are a thousand paths to it.
If you pass through the barrier,
you walk the universe alone. ~ Wu Men
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” ~ Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” – Anna Quindlen
