Having good ideas is important, whether you're an entrepreneur, manager, artists, student, or just trying to manage your life. There is a history around the word 'idea', but I won't go into that here. What we commonly refer to when we talk about ideas is certain kind of thought that occurs in the mind as a result of our experiences--phrases like 'flashes of insight' or 'eureka moments' seek to pin-point what ideas are.
There are countless books written about ideas. Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From will give you plenty of insight--at least it has for me. As a researcher and writer, I'm always looking for good ideas, but even as Johnson maintains, it's not always easy. Here are a few tips:
1. Drink coffee: You don't like coffee? It doesn't matter--drink it. According to Johnson, the Enlightenment was spawned by the rise of coffee consumption and the cafes; in fact, cafes, rather than pubs, became the breeding ground for the surge of intellectualism that period boasts. Does this imply that you won't get good ideas if you're a tea drinker, or don't consume caffeinated drinks at all? Of course not. But coffee is known to dramatically stimulate the brain, spawning new ideas.
2. Document: If you're after good ideas you can't afford to lazily go through life on autopilot. You need to capture your experiences, thoughts, reflections, brain waves. If you haven't done this before, go and get yourself a notebook and play journalist for the day: write down what you see, conversations you hear, and your reflections on them--you won't believe it. This is one of the oldest and most effective ways of getting good ideas--it's no wonder that the acclaimed notebook company Moleskine was inspired by the notebooks of Hemingway, Picasso, and Van Gogh. I'm surprised by how many people do not practice this simple way of recording one's life. Try it.
3. Walk around: The flaneur was a French phenomenon in the 19th Century embodied by the painter or writer or philosopher who would wander through the streets of Paris experiencing the world and...feeding his or her ideas. Did the flaneur have a particular place to go? No. Was the point of the walk to merely wander around? Yes. There is a rich history of the flaneur. How does it work? Simple. You're working through an idea or problem, and thus your mind is attuned to it. But your idea or solution needs some diversity to pull all the pieces together into something rich and original and salient. You take a walk through the mall or along the streets and everything you witness jumps out at you and congeals with the problems your mind is working on--and whammo! The new idea or insight emerges. But you have to make sure you have your notebook handy to write it all down. If you want to see an entertaining movie about the flaneur, see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
4. Give yourself time: Yes I know your boss is seriously pressing you for a new idea, or you're a boss and you need a big idea for the next quarter, or you're a student pressed for time on a research paper due tomorrow morning--but...you need to give yourself time. Ideas don't just pop out of nowhere; and they can't be rushed. Some ideas take decades to come to fruition. Think of the poet Bukowski who compared a poem--an idea--to a spider that he watches quietly crawling down the wall: it takes its time; it crawls a few steps down, then scurries back up. Do you have the patience to wait for it? Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From calls this "the slow hunch" contrasted with the often-used but rarely experienced "Eureka moment." The slow hunch is the problem you walk around with for a long time; the one that requires a ton of experience to germinate; the one that is in need of other sources of knowledge and information and a diversity of practice to really emerge. It takes time.
5. Diversity of information: If you have a business problem, go to the museum. If you have a science problem, go to the mall and tinker around at the Apple Store. If you are researching for a social science paper, or working on engineering a new technology, go to a butterfly conservatory, or the symphony, or wander through the forest. You see, you need to get diverse, not monolithic. Your brain needs stimulation from other sources to put the pieces together--as mentioned above. If you're working on a design problem, read about bees. Dive into the Encyclopedia Britannica and read all kinds of random articles. Do anything you can to get diversity. Johnson calls this "serendipity": when ideas bounce around into other ideas and voila--a new insight.
There are many other ways to get new ideas, but these five are a good place to start. My go-to is the notebook--I take mine everywhere. It's a slim one that slips into my jeans pocket, and in which I mark down as much as I can; a lot of it's nonsense, but there are a few flecks of gold dust in there somewhere. Also, read everything. If you're not a reader, become one. Read biographies, especially of creative people: how did they work, what were their habits? Read read read. Then jot down your thoughts in your notebook. Sounds simple? At least that part of it is.
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