All CEO’s nowadays want innovation, which comes from inspired ideas. But how can one get inspired ideas? Mitch Ditkoff gives 14 ways to do so in the article above.
1. Follow your fascination – if you find yourself fascinated by a certain idea, expand on that.
2. Immerse yourself with one task – you won’t find breakthrough ideas while multitasking. Sit down and focus on one thing.
3. Tolerate ambiguity – you will most likely not get a breakthrough right away, so you need to be comfortable with “not knowing.”
4. Make new connections – take a few different things, and put them together in a new way.
5. Fantasize – use your imagination.
6. Define the right challenge – in order to find an answer, you need a question.
7. Listen to your subconscious – when you get stuck after consciously trying to come up with an idea, pay attention to dreams and random thoughts that come into your head.
8. Take a break – when you hit a wall, walk away from it and do something else for a little bit. Come back to the problem with a fresh mind.
9. Notice and challenge existing patterns and trends – find patterns in whatever you’re thinking about, and come up with a new configuration.
10. Hang out with diverse groups of people – get the input of different types of people, it’s the idea of collective intelligence.
11. Brainstorm – most great breakthroughs are about collaborations than just one guy’s ideas.
12. Look for happy accidents – watch for those moments when the answer is shown to you for no reason.
13. Use creative thinking techniques – these act as jumper cables to get your brain’s motor running.
14. Suspend logic – don’t think about what is conventional. Let your imagination run wild.
These are all really great ideas to give you a boost in your creative life. I’ll bring your attention more closely to three of these in particular, two have helped me in my creative life, and one I have a bone to pick with. I’ll start with that one.
Look back at #13. In the article, Ditkoff gives links to websites that generate ideas to get people started on their thinking processes. The only problem I see with this is that, since it is on a website, someone has already had that idea. Since you get it off that website, you are getting the idea from someone else, so it is therefore not exclusively your idea. I suppose if you’re really stuck in a rut, and you’re hard-pressed for inspiration, this could be a good tool to use, but if you’re trying to have a breakthrough idea of your own, this isn’t the way to go about doing that.
The two tools for getting inspired that have really helped me, though, are numbers 2 and 8. Sometimes we get so much piled on to our plate that we don’t know how we’re going to get through our to-do list. That’s where immersing yourself in one single task comes in. Whenever I’m feeling swamped with work, I hide my to-do list so I don’t see all the stuff I have to do, and I focus all my attention on one task until it is completed. Then I take a break, and immerse myself in the next task. Whenever I get jammed up on something, I put it away for a couple minutes, listen to a couple songs, get on Facebook, take a break. Then I come back to it all refreshed, and I work through to the next jam.
The next thing I’m going to do is give you an example of how I would put into practice that first idea of following your fascination with a couple questions provided by Ditkoff.
· What new idea is fascinating you? I am a Young Life leader at Athens Middle School. What we do is teach middle schoolers about God. One way we do this is by getting involved in their lives and building up relationships with them. An idea that is fascinating me right now is to use my various talents to help with their school’s yearbook, band, or drama club.
· What new possibility has captured your attention? Like I said before, I recently had the idea to go help out wherever I can.
· In what ways can you honor this inspiration today? I can go up to the school, find the appropriate teachers to talk to, and get started.
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