It took me a long time to become the kind of person who has ideas all the time.
In fact, I became interested in ways to generate interesting ideas after one which popped into my mind out of the blue one morning in 2018 (after a meditation session).
It came in the form of a question:
‘Why have I never smoked a cigarette?’
And thus, The Bad Habit Kicker was born.
I’ve always been a reader, and a person with a particularly vivid imagination. Amongst my circle of friends, the standing joke is that if you say something in front of me, I see it in vivid graphic, technicolour detail.
Cue much hilarity and teasing. 🙈
But reading a lot and being able to imagine things doesn’t necessarily lead to new ideas.
I decided in 2000, while driving back up the M6 motorway, somewhere on the long drive between Maidenhead and Bolton, that I wanted to be an author. That idea had been percolating in my brain since I was a child, to be fair, when one of my parents asked me what I wanted to do for a living.
‘I want to read books,’ I said. Once again, cue much hilarity. So much so that even though I could only have been 5 or 6 years old when this happened, I still remember it, almost 45 years later.
And so began an almost 16 year-long struggle to allow myself to be creative, on a regular basis. Because that’s what you need, in order to be an author. You need to get your bum on your chair and your fingers on the keyboard and to force yourself to sit there, until something comes to you, no matter whether it’s literary gold (I should be so lucky!) or something you’ll either wrangle into something useful or choose to delete the next day.
During that time, I continued to read a lot (fiction and non-fiction as well as countless self-help books) and I had sporadic success with writing regularly.
In fact, it’s a good time to push NaNoWriMo1 - National Novel Writing Month - which happens every November. The name is a bit of a misnomer, now, because while NaNo started in America, it’s something that’s spread around the globe, these days.
Basically, the challenge is to write 50,000 words (or more) which is the length of a short novel, in November. That’s 1,667 words a day. So, I went for a long time, writing a novel once a year, but somehow I just couldn’t get the creative habit to truly stick.
If you believe you have a novel in you (and most folks do, in my experience), sign up at NaNoWriMo.org - and put your thinking cap on, you have about a month and a half to plan what you want to write.
Ask yourself ‘what if…?’
Anyway, I digress. The point I was trying to make (related to generating ideas) was that while I was attempting to write regularly, I read a lot of books on the subject of writing. Too many probably, without actually getting a regular practice in place, but I was doing my best to work up to it...
My favourite of those, the one which has stuck with me, and which I refuse to take to the charity shop (I’m mostly pretty ruthless with physical books - when I read them, I get rid of them, unless I want to re-read them or they’re a collector’s item) is On Writing by Stephen King.
The advice which most struck me is to ask yourself ‘what if?’ questions.
King often starts with a "what-if" scenario, asking what would happen if an alcoholic writer was stranded with his family in a haunted hotel (The Shining), or if one could see the outcome of future events (The Dead Zone), or if one could travel in time to alter the course of history (11/22/63).
He writes that "The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate.
I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded a set of characters that they do things my way.
On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it's something I never expected."
So, I started to ask myself daily ‘what if?’
It’s a simple technique, and you can schedule the practice in to your day. Maybe as you drink your first cup of coffee, just grab a pad and a pen and write down 10 answers to the question ‘what if…?’
See what occurs, and while some days you might get 10 things you think you should immediately burn, there’ll be a few diamonds in the rough, if you persevere.
Allow yourself to get bored/listen to yourself
In order to actually work out what you think about things, and to bring ideas together into something new, we all need to stop distracting ourselves so damned much.
I know this isn’t easy. We’re brought up with a diet of entertainment, particularly in the west. When I was a kid, it was the TV. I used to spend hours just sitting there on the sofa, watching cartoons. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad. One of my happiest childhood memories is sitting on the floor in front of the TV in the summer with my mum, eating strawberries and cream and watching Wimbledon. I couldn’t have been older than 5 or 6.
These days, there are also games on pretty much every device you can think of, as well as endless streaming services to keep us from betting bored.
And as an adult, you can then throw in your mobile phone and all of the apps, notifications and calls you can get, at any hour of the day and night.
Is it any wonder that sometimes we don’t even have the faintest idea what we think about things? I know I didn’t, not until fairly recently.
I used TV and iOS games in order to avoid looking inward, too much.
Why?
My mum’s mindset was very much ‘people will stab you in the back if you give them a chance’ when I was growing up, and while I don’t really feel like that about people, any more (almost a decade spent teaching about 400 kids a week will do that to a person!) I think that idea was still lingering when it came to how I felt about myself. After all, if my mum had taught me that people were inherently bad, then why should I be any different? Some pretty awful childhood bullying had gone a long way to cementing the idea that while I might appear to be a nice person, there was probably something rotten, festering inside.
Cue plenty of journalling and working through that in order to boost my self-esteem this year…
Once I’d done that, I felt more comfortable (although not always entirely so) spending time doing the following two things.
Simply thinking
As I’ve written about in this article, I spend a minimum of 60 minutes a day, these days, just sitting and thinking. Now, I know I’m swimming in privilege when it comes to being able to put this habit in place, seeing as I’m single and childfree, with only a faithful hound to take care of, but even the busiest folks who’re reading this can surely carve out 15 minutes in their day to spend in peace and quiet, even if it means getting up a little bit earlier in the morning.
I don’t force myself to think about anything in particular, I just set a timer (Forest.app) on my phone, and on my Chrome browser (there’s an extension too), so I can’t distract myself too much, and I see where my thoughts take me. No devices, no internet, just me and a pad and a pen.
Maybe Brain.fm on a set of noise-cancelling headphones if that feels helpful.
Why do I do this? We access a different part of our brains when we write things down, rather than just thinking. Some days there’s not much on the page to show for my efforts, but on other days, I have this experience (this was written during my thinking time earlier this week):
These thinking sessions can be truly transformational. It’s as if I’m giving myself the time and space to pull together several seemingly unrelated strands of thoughts, feelings and ideas and weaving them together into some new fabric I can use to furnish my life.
There you go. That’s one way that ideas get created. By giving yourself some time and space to pull together things which don’t immediately seem to be connected, and seeing if something new is formed.
Not getting too many dopamine hits
The other thing I used to do in order to avoid risking listening to myself and discovering a demonic entity lurking deep within my soul (yes, I watch a lot of horror films, what of it?!) was to play endless iOS games.
You know the kind I mean. Not something like chess or something turn-based with a friend with an actual end point when someone wins, such as Words with Friends or Wordle. No, I’m talking about the kind of match-3 games where you’re rewarded for pressing buttons with sounds and animations and there’s always another level to play.
Every time you play those games, you get teeny tiny hits of dopamine - your pleasure receptors are activated and you’re rewarded. And for what? You’re not doing something which is going to move your life on in any appreciable way. You’re not earning more money or advancing your career. No, you’re like a rat in a cage, pressing on a lever for another morsel of food.
They’re addictive, I get that. They’re absolutely designed that way. No judgement. I was mildly addicted myself, for a while. But then I started to feel resentful of the time that was slipping away from me while I was playing them, and I weaned myself off them.
The other reason you don’t want to play too many of these kinds of games or spend too much time passively watching TV is because you want your brain to get actively bored, as I mentioned above.
The same goes for when you’re standing in line at the supermarket or in the post office. Don’t pull your phone out and scroll social media or check your email or text messages. Keep your phone resolutely in your pocket and do some people watching or allow your mind to wander a bit. You’ll be amazed at what comes up for you, when you do.
Is this a comfortable thing to do? Not at first it isn’t, no. the same goes for the thinking time. You’ll wriggle and try to get out of it, your mind will squirm like a worm on a hook.
But as you get used to it, you’ll find yourself actively looking forward to the activity. Trust me, it’s true. And in those pockets of time when you’re not distracting yourself and flooding your brain with dopamine, your mind (which is nothing more than a marvellous problem-solving machine) will thirst for something to do. And that again is often where strands of information suddenly combine to form something new - in the form of an idea! 💡
Reading/learning widely
I read books. A lot of books, every year without fail. I have done since I was a little kid.
I don’t take any particular pride in that. When people meet me and find out how much I read, their response is usually ‘Oh, I really should read more’ to which I often ask ‘why?’
Which tends to shock folks. I do love saying things which make people stop and think.
What I’m saying is that I don’t believe in doing things if they don’t work for you.
Reading isn’t some kind of morally superior thing, it doesn’t make you a better person than someone who doesn’t, it’s just a way of getting information, for passing the time, or for fun and sheer escapism.
And if it’s not fun for you, for whatever reason, then I don’t believe you should force yourself to do it. Life’s far too short!
Maybe you’re dyslexic or you’ve had some kind of bad experience with adults trying to force you to read when you were a child (I have a friend whose mum was an English teacher, and her efforts to get him to love reading, combined with his dyslexia were enough to put him off for life!) or perhaps you have Aphantasia.
Whatever the reason, though, when I say ‘read widely’ I don’t necessarily mean that you have to spend a fortune on Amazon or carry great stacks of books home from the library every week. While that sounds like absolute heaven to me, not everyone is the same in this world and that’s what makes it such a wonderful place!
We live in an age where all the knowledge of humankind is basically at our fingertips. If you don’t like to read, listen to audio books (most libraries have an audio book borrowing service as well as eBooks and physical copies, so it doesn’t even have to cost you money), or watch YouTube videos from subject matter experts in whatever field you’re interested in.
Don’t spend hours scrolling social media sites, they rarely teach you anything other than the fact that some people are very good at making their lives appear to be something they really aren’t, and you’re likely to tank your mood, looking at what appear to be the perfect lives of people who have the things you don’t have...
“Comparison is the thief of joy” - Theodore Roosevelt
Instead, go to websites which will teach you something. Look at Wikipedia’s home page every morning, rather than doom scrolling on Twitter. There’s a daily featured article as well as ‘on this day’ and ‘Did you know’ items. It’s amazing the tidbits of information you can pick up (great for a pub quiz, or randomly dropping into a conversation!) just by looking at that page for a minute or two.
Or take a look at a popular science magazine online, such as New Scientist, Wired or any other specialist publication which takes your fancy.
Listen to your heart and your brain when you read something. How do you feel? Are you getting little twinges of excitement or is it piquing your interest? Is this a topic you’d like to know more about?
Write those topics down, and seek out more information. This happens to me quite a lot.
I often joke that the biggest problem with reading a lot is that you realise how much stuff you know absolutely nothing about! It’s never-ending, and you could see that as a reason not to bother, or you could see it as a brilliant problem to have.
Surf from book to book, audiobook to podcast, YouTube video to online article, following your passions.
This year I’ve been on a feminist literature quest as well as one to do with books about music (bands, theory, gender in music) and for the last year or two I’ve been heavily into reading books on neuroscience and popular science about how our brains work.
Why am I suggesting you do this? There might be a part of you which is sighing and saying ‘but Lou, that all sounds like a lot of work, to me’.
Because digesting information, and following where it might lead, even if it seems random, can sometimes lead to the ability to make amazing connections between things, and to create something new from that, which you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
I can’t remember where I heard of the idea now (on a podcast, at some point over the last 18 months, I think) but a host suggested adding in some time every day to your calendar and calling it an InfoSoak. During that time, you read (or listen) widely in your chosen format, and you follow those itches which only learning more about something will scratch. It doesn’t need to be anything to do with your job, or anything that you think will lead into anything useful. Do it for the love of it, do it because you’re fascinated and engaged and you want to pour information into your brain.
I also set my bedroom Alexa device up to tell me something new (and interesting) every morning just after my alarm’s gone off. The other morning, it told me that it’s Beyoncé’s birthday. On Friday, it was to do with monkeys picking stocks and beating the stockbrokers.
Try it for 30 days and see where it takes you. If nothing else, you’ll have far more conversational topics and interesting tidbits of information to share with friends and family2, and it might well lead onto a new hobby, passion or even a career! You never know!
Pomodoro Technique
If the idea of sitting down for an hour and just thinking (trust me, I know how you feel, I felt exactly the same for the longest time) or spending an hour reading scares you half to death then a slightly more palatable option might be using the Pomodoro Technique.
The technique is named tomato (in Italian) after those adorable little mechanical doodads you can get to time yourself when you need to boil an egg. 🍅
The idea is that you intersperse periods of being productive (which for idea generation might be thinking, or might be reading) with a break. And that those time periods are short - 20 or 25 minutes, say.
Why does this work? Because for a start, it’s easier to swallow the idea of spending shorter chunks of time to learn or to think. And you always know you’re not far away from a break, so there’s that carrot, which helps you to stay on track.
You can find out more about the idea here. This technique can be quite helpful for folks with ADHD and other neurospiciness, as it’s structured and also not a huge or overwhelming time commitment (especially as you can lengthen or shorten it to suit you), which helps if you’re worried about all the other stuff you have to do.
YMMV, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a go.
One little caveat, though - if you’re doing this to try to help you generate ideas, try not to do anything dopamine-inducing or similarly enticing during your breaks, such as playing a game or watching TV. It’ll be way harder to get yourself back into the next working section, if you do, and you’ll also be less likely to get into the state I’m going to talk about next.
Try to get into flow
Flow is a technique I learned about when I was a teacher. You may well have experienced it yourself, but might not have a name for it, just yet.
I’m pretty sure it’s something human beings have been doing forever, but the term was coined in 1990 by an author called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
In basic terms, Flow is when you’re completely absorbed in a task, and the hours fly by without you realising. There’s a sweet spot to try to get into flow, where the task has to be challenging but not too challenging, something which pushes you a little out of your comfort zone but not so far that you feel afraid. And you need to have no distractions to pull your focus, you can’t multitask (or try, anyway - there’s actually no such thing as multitasking, just really fast context switching, but that’s a topic for another article).
If you’d like to know more, there are loads of articles online (such as this one), as well as the book, which you can find here.
And I just found a TED talk that the author gave in 2004: Flow, the secret to happiness
Mindmapping
In the spirit of trying to make connections between things and looking for patterns to help you to come up with ideas, you might give mind mapping (a technique outlined in 1993 By Tony Buzan in The Mind Map Book) a go.
Simply take a large sheet of paper, write down the topic you’re interested in in the middle, and then add everything else you can think of which is linked, around the outside. You’ll end up with something like this:
It’s a way of brainstorming (or making notes on a complicated topic you have to learn/memorise) and via the use of drawings and colour, you can create something that’s easier to remember and which can help you to link things together in ways you might previously not have thought of.
Colouring books/apps
Anything which allows your mind to wander without giving you dopamine hits can be helpful when you’re trying to come up with ideas, and adult colouring books (or apps) are also something I’ve used in the past.
I don’t need to say much more about this, other than it can be a really enjoyable activity, and there are loads of free downloadable resources and apps online and in your phone’s App Store you can try.
Give it a whirl, you might be surprised at what bubbles to the surface of your mind while you’re absorbed in this activity!
Binaural beats
These help to enhance your concentration by playing different (complimentary) sounds in your ears, to try to induce a different set of brainwaves, via your headphones.
There are loads of apps and audio examples online - YouTube have plenty you could try for free and I like Brainwave on the iOS App Store as well as Brain.fm.
You can usually tell the app what it is you’re looking for - whether you need to be creative or upbeat, and some apps even claim they have sounds which can help with headaches and hangovers!
I can’t comment on that, but I can tell you that when I combine Brain.fm with my 60 minutes of distraction-free thinking time, some really interesting stuff often comes up for me!
As I mentioned, there are tracks (Spotify also has some) and apps available for free, so it won’t cost you anything to give it a go!
Meditation
And finally, here’s our old friend meditation, which I mention in almost every article I write (kind of feels like that to me, anyway!)
Everyone can meditate, so get that argument out of your mind right now. The aim of meditation is not no thoughts (that’s impossible because our brains are designed specifically to create them and they will until the day we draw our last breath!) but rather in not getting swept up in them, and allowing yourself time and space to focus on the present moment instead of ruminating on the events of the past or worrying about the future.
There are guided meditations on YouTube, and also apps you can get for free (my favourite is Insight Timer), or you could keep things really simple and just do this:
Sit down somewhere comfortably. You don’t have to sit cross legged on a cushion, on your sofa or a chair will do.
Ensure you won’t be distracted (doing this before your family wakes up might be helpful if you’re a busy parent).
Set a timer for 5 minutes.
Close your eyes.
As you breathe in, count 1.
Exhale, slowly. Say 1 in your mind.
Repeat steps 5/6 and try to get to 10.
If a thought pops into your mind and derails you, don’t berate yourself, just let it go, as if you’re releasing a handful of leaves onto a flowing stream, and start again at 1.
Keep going until the timer goes off.
That’s it. I told you it wasn’t complicated.
Why is it helpful when it comes to generating ideas? I think it’s because you’re making your mind as calm as possible, and also not providing it with any input, so ideas kind of bubble up to the surface, without you being aware of them.
I hope this article has given you some things you can try to help to encourage your brain to come up with new ideas, and of course it’s not an exhaustive list, there are plenty of other ways (such as Dalí’s Naps).
Whether you’re working in a creative field full-time, doing something creative as a hobby, or just want ideas for your corporate day job, having more ideas can lead your life in directions you sometimes won’t expect!
Do you have your own tricks and tips to share when it comes to generating ideas? I’d love to hear them…
Yes, I know there’s been a lot of controversy about NaNoWriMo just recently. That aside, it’s still a really helpful challenge if you want to produce a novel-length piece of writing.
This is exactly how I managed to have this to hand to successfully drop into a conversation the other day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle
Love this! It is very comprehensive while not feeling daunting.