5 steps to generating lots of creative ideas.
My favorite book on creativity is by my friend and mentor Jack Matson. It is called “Innovate or Die”, from 1995. Matson talks about “Intelligent Fast Failure” (IFF): Failure is painful and expensive, but if you’re going to map a new terrain, failure is the way to begin, so you might as well commit to doing it fast, and to being intelligent about it. The opposite of IFF is “Stupid, slow failure”, which is even harder. He writes in Innovate or Die:
As an innovator, you must understand that failure is normal. Your job is to make sure you have the resources to thoroughly experiment and map the unknown, to set up the trials so that speedy feedback is achieved.
Here are some of Matson’s principles for creativity:
Capture your ideas quickly. Your mind is always generating ideas. But they dissipate quickly, oftentimes in under a minute. “The first order of business, then, is to capture your ideas by writing them down on any scrap of paper.” Matson says, “I keep repeating the importance of writing down ideas because this is where most people fail.” I use an audio recorder that I carry with me at all times on my phone.
Keep an idea journal. This is not just a diary in which you record “what happened” throughout the day; rather, your idea journal is an adventure-land where you write down new ideas from #1 above, and then embellish with drawings, graphs, schematics, words, or other info.
Aim for quantity. Aim for quantity over quality with your idea journal. After all, at first you don’t know the quality anyway. If you come up with 5 ideas per day in the first week, then aim for 10 or 25 or 50 ideas per day in the second week to increase your creative output. If you can’t think of “good ideas”, create and write down as many “bad ideas” or “contrary ideas” as possible.
Run experiments fast. After you have ideas in your Idea Journal, you’re ready to run some experiments. This is the IFF principle mentioned above. Much of this book is about testing hypotheses fast, using questions to de-personalize any “failures” to avoid demoralizing you or your team.
Shift the paradigm. This happens when your idea is profound enough to change how people see the problem. A shifting paradigm starts with a good answer to Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” When you start, almost nobody might agree; with time, you gain a following.
For your idea journal, take ideas from your day, transcribe them in the journal, and elaborate on them with drawings and schematics, maybe even plots or process steps. “Create new gibberish”. The idea journal gives the raw material from which you’ll select ideas worthy of running experiments on later.
