I love hearing the words, “I’m not creative.” It’s the easiest thing to fix. It might take some time for the transformation to happen, but it’s not difficult. So, how can you do it?
Get out of your own way. Let your ideas run free.
The problem is not that you have no good ideas, it’s that you’re scared of having bad ideas. I hate to break it to you, but you HAVE to have bad ideas in order to have good ones. It’s just a math problem. Say 10% of your ideas are good. You need to have 10 ideas in order to find a good one in there. That means 9 are going to be bad. So what?
Trying to increase your percentage of good ideas is a poor use of time. The only way you’ll ever get it higher is by having more ideas and developing more intuition. Plus, who cares? This isn’t baseball. No one is measuring your “good idea percentage.”
The only way to have more good ideas is too have more bad ideas.
So now that the problem is that you need to have more ideas, how do we optimize for quantity? Easy. Stop censoring yourself. Open up the floodgates of your mind. Don’t catch ideas before they slip out of your mind and onto the paper. You’re really bad at deciding what ideas are good and bad. You have to release them all into the world before you can really know. Try it out. Brainstorm ideas to improve the education system in America. You’ll probably feel stuck at 5 or 10, but that’s when things start to get interesting. Try to resist the temptation to censor yourself and just keep writing.
Next time you’re not sure if you should share an idea, do it. Know that you’re now one step closer to your next good idea.
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