How many times have you sat down in your cubicle, punched in at the clock, or put your purple-logoed hat on, faced the day before you, and sighed, wishing that you had that big idea that would finally emancipate you from the workaday grind? The next popular novel, or video game, or website— It doesn’t seem that difficult! People come up with ideas all the time! But somehow, your ticket out never arrived. What are you doing wrong?
The problem with coming up with an idea is that you don’t know what it is yet. It isn’t even lurking in your subconscious, waiting for you to notice it. It’s just. Not. There. And waiting for it to come along on its own isn’t going to do you any good. The only way to put it there is through old fashioned, brute force thinkin’, and that is where most people stumble and give up. Thinking is hard, especially when you don’t have any guidance as far as what direction to think in.
That lack of guidance, however, is what you must embrace if you’re going to actively coalesce your Big Idea. Some ideas will just happen naturally, yes. Against the odds, even the Big One might happen that way. But the only way to raise your chances at a great idea is to make an effort, and that means opening your mind to thoughts you would ordinarily suppress. Just as an egg does not realize its full potential until it is broken, so too must you break open your head on the side of a skillet. I’ll wait while you do that.
There are two situations in which I come up with the majority of my ideas. The first, and most common, is when I do it by necessity. If I need to come up with a topic for a post on Bathtub Brewery, for example, I’ll sit down, stare into space, start thinking arbitrarily about beer, and just let my mind go from there. Beer becomes barley becomes farms becomes cows becomes grass becomes green becomes Green Party becomes Politics becomes this post. This works well when you’re on a deadline and need something now, but you aren’t going to find your Way Out of the Machine this way. In order to do that, you have to go take a dump.
The second, far less common idea-generating scenario is any instance in which I’m simply sitting around, not focused on anything in particular, just letting thoughts and images ebb and flow through my head like happy little parasites. This happens much too infrequently for most people: We are constantly on task, cranking out one widget so that we can move on to the next one, never giving our minds a moment to just chill. But this is when you’re more likely to find your Big Idea!
Lifehack posted a great article at the beginning of this year about how to give your mind the wander time it needs. Though the angle they take is geared more towards todo lists, this would also work as a daily “creativity meditation”. Sit in a quiet, private place with a notebook for 15 minutes, let your mind wander, and any time something in your thoughts congeals to the point where you can write it down, write it down, forget about it, and move on. At the end of those 15 minutes, you may have five new ideas, or fifty, or none, but you’ll have given yourself a chance to brainstorm, which is all anyone can ask of themselves.
The best part is, you already have a 15 minute block of privacy set aside for yourself every day: It’s called pooping. I’m serious. If the idea of spending time each morning thinking for thinking’s sake seems hard to fit into your schedule, then stop bringing a magazine to the bathroom with you, and start bringing a notepad. If you can do this every day, then maybe that Big Idea will finally come out of you!
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