Battery003: Where do great ideas come from?
Why quantity matters for creativityStating the obvious: some ideas are definitely worse than others. Like buying the Brooklyn Bridge or choosing plastic surgeon on price alone (no pics). And then there are the great ones, the wheel, the Negg, the abolition of slavery just to name a few.
Also quite obvious: we want more of the good ones and less of the bad. And some people seem to have figured it out: the Jobs, Gates, Bezos of the world. Is it just that they were lucky in the gene lottery? Maybe, but hey, we all have to play the hand we’re dealt! So what to do?
Unfortunately it is not possible to decide beforehand to come up with a great idea. It is not until after the fact the we can know if it was good or bad, sometimes it can take decades.
What we can do is increase the chances, the probability for great ideas to appear. It turns out that people with great ideas have the same share of bad ideas as the rest of us. The difference is that they generate a lot more ideas. Quality is a result of quantity!
Increasing the number of ideas is the topic for this issue of Battery. Not by producing ten times more ideas on the same silly problem, but by increasing the number of “problems” that scream for attention.
And there is a ton of opportunities hiding in plain sight! We just have to start seeing them, and this is a matter of mindset.
The first article is about what I call the innovation trigger. Whenever something feels complicated we should take a step back and realize that this is an opportunity to be creative, to innovate!
If something feels complicated…
Creating a mindset for problem solving and innovation
The second is about why we should nurture a contrarian mindset. There will be no great ideas if we just accept reality as it is. So by constantly questioning everything we might annoy the crap out of our friends but we will have an infinite source of material to generate ideas from.
Be a rebel, question everything!
How an obnoxious personality trait can fuel creativity and innovation
The last is about a single word: “obvious”. Whenever we scratch the surface of something that seems obvious we realize that it was much more complex than we thought. Discarding something as obvious is a lost opportunity to be creative and innovate.
In defense of the “obvious”
Not the label but the stuff we find when we scratch the surface
So this is the first step in the process: to increase the number of ideas just by generating more “problems” that need to be solved. We are already much more creative!
The next step is to come up with ideas for solutions. This will be a topic for a future issue!
