If you’ve ever faced Writer’s Block, you know how hard it is to come up with good ideas on demand.
The thing is, we live in the age of an “economy of ideas”. Technology has freed up people from farming and industrial work, and these days more and more people work with their brains instead of their hands.
If programming is the second literacy, then the ability to generate ideas and work with ideas will be the third.
Nowadays, it is much easier to become an influencer, a creator, a maker. You just need a smartphone with the internet and be able to come up with cool ideas.
Generating ideas is a learnable skill, like any other. It is possible to learn to generate ideas, categorize them, sort out good from bad and turn ideas into a concept or a piece of content.
In the design and tech world, many people are familiar with Design Thinking methodologies, which give you proven ways of guiding a group of people to create and work with ideas.
However, here is the problem with producing ideas.
You can never come up with a great idea on the spot, just because you need an idea in the moment.
I’m not talking about the kind of ideas that just pop into your head, because they’ve been brewing there for quite a while, and all of a sudden you “connected the dots”.
I mean that it is almost impossible to think of a really good original idea whenever you like, on-demand.
Even if you happen to think of a seemingly great idea on the spot, chances are, it either can be significantly improved or it even might turn out not that great after all.
Here is one way, that works.
One of the best ways to produce a great idea is to start with a bad idea and iterate on it until it becomes great. By iterating I mean a process of improving, adapting it, tweaking it based on conversations and interactions that arise around this idea.
Of course, “bad” doesn’t mean starting with a terrible and useless idea, but rather an average idea that’s just not great yet, but given time, “could actually work” and even might just become The Idea.
The most important thing about his approach is to keep iterating, changing and improving the idea by colliding it with other information and ideas over a period of time.
For example, if you come up with a new product concept, or create content around an idea — speak with as many people as possible to see how what they say can improve your idea (obviously, you want to focus on the target audience, people whom your idea is for).
If you do engineering, manifest the idea in the real world to see how well it’d perform and should be better. Create prototypes to quickly iterate and try different versions, to find the next small improvement, so that with every small step your design gets better and better, even if your original idea wasn’t particularly great.
What’s really interesting is that the purpose of iterating on an idea is mostly not to find new ideas and connect them to the original one, but rather to find what sucks about the idea and to fix it, so that with every change the idea starts becoming better and better by sucking less.
"I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures.
But I learned from each one. That's how I came up with a solution. So I don't mind failure. I've always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they've had.
The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.”
— Sir James Dyson
It’s also good to explore a bunch of different bad ideas in the beginning, review as many as possible, and select not just one, but a few.
This way you can avoid optimizing for the local maximum.
But even “bad” ideas take a lot of effort. The best way to collect a bunch of them is by not having to extract them from your head at all. One way to do that is to learn as much new information as possible, observe the world, listen to people, and take notes.
You will find how collecting ideas becomes surprisingly easy all of a sudden. Next time you need a starting point ― you just go through your notes and pick the next thing.
Here is why it works.
The biggest cause of writer’s block is perfectionism.
We all have a natural tendency to avoid wasting time on something that might not work, and we want to have reassurance that we do a great job by coming up with only great ideas.
Once you give yourself permission to start with a bad idea, there are no barriers for you to move forward.
“If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”
― Steve Jobs
Your feedback is, as always, very important. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions.
If you’re on Twitter, follow me for more thoughts, ideas and mental models @vladmakes.