A Daily Practice to Spark Creativity
Sep 22, 2024
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” – Linus Pauling
Feeling creatively blocked or out of ideas? We’ve all been there – whether it’s deciding what to cook for dinner, figuring out your next project, or brainstorming ways to attract new customers. When inspiration seems far away, it’s time to build your “idea muscle.”
Build Your Idea Muscle
In Choose Yourself: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream, James Altucher proposes developing your “idea muscle” as a way to foster creativity and generate innovative solutions. He argues that coming up with ideas is like exercising a muscle—the more you do it, the stronger and more efficient you become. Here’s how:
- Daily Idea Practice: Altucher suggests writing down 10 ideas every day, no matter how silly or impractical they seem. The goal isn’t to come up with brilliant ideas immediately, but to train your mind to think creatively.
- Quantity Over Quality: Focus on producing ideas consistently. Don’t edit them. The quality will improve with practice.
- Variety and Exploration: Your ideas don’t need to solve specific problems that you have. They can range from simple lists to wild, imaginative solutions.
- Collaborate and Share: Ideas aren’t just for you – share them with others. You never know when your brainstorming could spark inspiration in someone else.
- Rest and Recover: Take care of your brain with good nutrition and rest. Give your idea muscle time to recover and then exercise it again.
Here’s what this could look like:
10 Ways to Get to Work
- Drive using back roads
- Ride a bike
- Walk
- Public transportation
- Hot air balloon
- Carpool
- Jet pack
- Beam over like in Star Trek
- Open a portal like Dr. Strange
- Helicopter ride
As you can see, this exercise not only helps with practical ideas but also encourages creative thinking.
Your First Month of Prompts
To get you started, here are 30 prompts for your first month of idea practice. Brainstorm 10 ideas for each of the following:
- Items for your Bucket List
- Ways to relieve stress for free
- Random acts of kindness anyone can do
- Best habits for self-care
- Bodyweight exercises for any fitness level
- Meals to make with 5 ingredients or less
- Things to eliminate from your house to declutter it
- Hobbies for someone who likes being outside
- Things to do on a date night for less than $100
- Essentials for a cool backyard
- Best things to do on a staycation in your city
- Books to recommend to young adults
- Best advice you ever received
- Topics for EFT Tapping
- New flavors of ice cream
- Ways to cook zucchini
- Draw 10 t-shirt designs
- Improvements you’d make to your car if you were the engineer
- Companies to buy if you had Elon Musk’s budget
- Solutions to a world problem
- New services Amazon could offer
- Titles for a podcast you could create
- Foreign languages you would like to speak
- Business ideas for a 20-year-old not going to college
- Birthday party themes for someone turning 100
- Unusual vacation destinations
- Uses for an empty toilet paper roll
- New uses for a can opener
- Baby names no one has ever heard of
- Alternate endings for a TV series like Lost
Build your “idea muscle” and let the creativity flow! For more inspiration, be sure to watch my EFT Tapping video on this topic.