How To Come Up With Brilliant Ideas

How To Come Up With Brilliant Ideas

Divergent thinking involves exploration. It's wandering through of ideas that you already had in your memory banks about pens, what they could be related to, and what pens ought not to be related to. - AH

Creativity isn't just important for artists. In fact, you need it in whatever you do. If you're a student facing a hard exam question, an athlete on the losing side with 5 minutes to go, or have heavy-demanding work, creative thinking increases your potential.

What is creativity? It's when you come up with new stuff that has benefits in the real world. You can create a song. But it needs to be new and valuable. If the song sucks, you're not really creative.

There are 2 pathways for creativity. Now we'll focus on divergent thinking. This is when you take some info and make it diverge away into different use cases. So, a paper is usually used for writing. But you could fold it into a paper airplane. Or use it to play basketball 🗑️. You create new options.

Your brain usually suppresses these ideas. There's a part of your prefrontal cortex that literally does that. Divergent thinking ignores that region and lets you explore new possibilities.

Action for the day

There are 3 options. Choose whichever you like.

1. Imagine a brown brick. It's usually used for buildings. But you need to find other use cases.
   Examples: hold a door open, stand on it to be taller, or add weight to a backpack.
   Find 3 creative uses for a brick (2 minutes)
   ​

2. Think of a personal problem you have. It could be an issue with relationships, work, or health.
   What are 3 creative ways you can solve this problem?
   Come up with them now (2 minutes)
   ​

3. Look at this newsletter :) What are some creative ways it can be better?
   Maybe more colors, habit-tracking, leaderboards, reminders...
   What do you think? Feel free to reply to this email (2 minutes).

Any of these put you in a divergent thinking state. By doing them now, your mind will default to his state and keep pumping out good ideas.

Choose one of the 3 options and do it now

p.s. if you come up with ideas for the emails, send it over. You might have a creative breakthrough that'll change the entire world. And we don't want it to just stay in your head. So don't hesitate, just press reply and share it. Thanks!