Intro
Ideas are a batting game. You need to generate a billion of them to get the worthy 10. Following this, idea generation needs to be a personal practice.
As with all practices, for this, there are evergreen and fundamental ideas codified into Principles and Methods.
Principles
- Ideas are new combinations of old elements.
- New combinations depend on the ability to see relationships.
Methods
Gather
There are two kinds of materials / ideas to gather for better chances of new and striking combinations: specific materials about product and the people of interest and general ideas about life and events.
Have a general curiousity about life and events, and equal curiousity about your creation and colleagues. You can also enormously expand your experience vicariously but this is best done as an end in itself.
In all, patient living seems to me to be necessary to discover the unique interesting idea in each topic.
To store and organize ideas, you need a system.
- The card-index, where you write one item / idea on a card and overtime build classes for the cards.
- The scrapbook or file for indexing and cross-indexing index cards.
Digest
For all you learn, observe each in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. Take each apart and see how it fits with other facts in the index. It is likely three things happen in sequence:
- Little partial ideas will come to you. Get them down.
- You will get very tired of trying to fit your puzzle together. Keep trying to get one or more partial thoughts onto your little cards.
- After a while you will reach the hopeless stage. Everything is a jumble in your mind, with no clear insight anywhere.
Relax
Drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can. Turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theatre or movies.
Capture
Out of nowhere the Idea will appear — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. Capture and detail as best you can.
Share with humility
“A good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.”
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