If you’re used to scanning a newspaper at work, try opening the “wrong” section of the newspaper next time. Something you normally wouldn’t read. Scan the headlines and look for an interesting idea you’ve never considered before. What info can you learn and use from that section? How to cross-pollinate ideas?

If you don’t read newspaper and scan the internet instead, ask your colleague for suggested websites they read, and you don’t. scan those.

My first encounter with this method was nearly 2 decades ago. I wanted to find a unique solution to a problem at work and needed an external set of eyes to see things from different perspectives. I visited a bookstore and opened different types of magazines, on space, engineering, pastry making. Things I had no clue or interest in at the time. I was trying to find a similar problem to mine but in a different context. My problem was getting people to work together systematically in a nonprofit organization, and my solution was right there in a car mechanic magazine.

To hear this and other stories on how to use your intentions at work, here’s a video I did a few years ago https://tinyurl.com/y8tfb97c

When you ask colleagues at work what do they fear the most, it’s not usually financial loss or wasted lifetime.
The fear that most employees share is the risk to their pride, status, and what others think of them if they fail at a task.
This fear has stopped so many great ideas from being shipped into the world and stopped a lot of people from speaking up in meetings.
They worry, “What if they were ridiculed?”, “ What if it doesn’t work?”
The questions needed here are,
“What if it works?”
“So what if others don’t agree?”
“How is that really affecting me?”
“What if I never get this chance again?”

Being afraid is not the problem. It’s a protection mechanism. It helps you stay alert.
Being stopped by this fear is the problem. It holds you back and questions your intuition. It will take a lot of courage for you to get out of your comfort zone and test a risky idea.

But it is oh-so-worth-it!

Last week I invited you to go find problems at work (not make problems, just find them).

Let’s take this up a notch and exercise your creative thinking at work.

Make a list of 30 things that bothers you at work. Anything from finding a
good parking spot to getting a working pen when you need it, to being inspired
during a long and monotonous meeting. Ask your colleagues for their problems.
Collect them.

Now look at your long list and think: what simple tweaks in your daily
routine or small changes in work setting that will result in being closer to
solving this mini problem?

Remember what Muhammad Ali said, “It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that
wear you down. It’s the pebble in your shows”.

Celebrate your small win.

Rinse and repeat.

What’s your word for the day?

A single word can build and preserve your creative momentum of the day.
Pick a word, write it down, keep the note in front of you for the day (or the week). This will be your criterion for decision making.
A word like “adventure” will guide you through decisions in terms of picking food, planning a work-related project, engaging in a team exercise or clearing up space. Compare that to a word like “prosperity”, what changes will that make on how you go through the day?

Pay attention to your understanding of the word.
What feelings does it evoke?

A word like “confidence” could represent the meaning of………. “empowerment”,……… “elegance” …………or ………. “respect”.
Which one do you associate with the most?
You understanding of this one-word will affect the outcome of whatever decision you make that day.
The same word can change meaning used on another day.
So choose with intention.

A simple mind hack that to help you start flowing with ideas is to switch things upside down (or inside out) and ask the question again with that new “negative” perspective.

Rather than asking yourself “How can I finish all what I need to do this week on time?”, simply say “How can I make sure that I get nothing done this week?”.

List all the ways that answers this flip question. From sleeping all night and taking multiple naps, to making sure you don’t delegate a single things to not prioritizing any task.

Then, one by one, convert those ideas into your current situation and see how you can figure things out with this new perspective in the background. How can you really finish everything on time? Do you have to finish them all?

we default to negative thinking by nature. We immediately find faults in others’ ideas and we can see why things will not work out, because, we tell ourselves, we are experts and we have tried something similar before, and it didn’t work out. So this is how we use this negative thinking to our advantage. You’ll see that your brain will have no problem whatsoever thinking of ways that things will not work. Let it do its magic.

Here’s another example with the new question in place:  

How can you make sure you offer the worst customer service ever possible? What are all the ways you need to do in order to drive customers away?

Go.

As a child, I was very distracted with my experiments.  

Me and my friends followed information like sniffing dogs. We had sponge-like brains that absorbed insight from all directions. What we lacked in knowledge we made up with imagination. 

A day in my life would start after school. When I’m out discovering how the world worked and what can we do to get what we want. Once, obsessed with healthy hair, we created a 6-hour hair mask that included raw eggs, olive oil, vinegar and crushed garlic mixed with medicine pills. Another time, when introduced to aerodynamics, we designed a flying mechanism that included pink balloons and plenty of plastic bags up our arms. We were ready to test it from the roof of a four-story building. And when it came to finding excuses not to go to school, we thought of heating our bodies in the oven, just two degrees extra, and pretend we had fever. Those are some examples of me making sense of knowledge I gained from sources around you. Thank God no internet was available then. I’ll give you the results of these experiments in a minute. Stay with me.

How we absorb experiences and think differently?

As a highly kinetic learner, I seek constant stimuli. Well beyond what my environment is able to provide. I try not to get too comfortable in one place as that may stop the flow of inspiration. On the other hand, as a divergent thinker, I consider providing as much stimuli in the ideas I share or the solutions I consider.

When thinking divergently, we generate ideas that go well beyond the scope at hand. We associate ideas with other topics. We create analogies. We power up our imagination. This mode typically occurs in a spontaneous “non-linear” manner that makes it possible to have many possible solutions in a short amount of time and draw unexpected connections.  

To stay the course of being truly divergent, we stay in this uncomfortable phase a little bit longer than the “regular” non-divergent people. We don’t stop on the first good-enough idea. We continue diverging until we get the best solution possible. Only when we demand to produce 10x more than what our brain expects, will it go out of its way to link unrelated concepts together, build on previous or others’ ideas, or see the unseen. We become the creative ideas we are producing. 

I knew early in my life that I am a problem solver and I think through ideas differently. It came easy for me and I learned how to feed my brain so that ideas come in high quantity, on demand. My early life experiments came in handy as I learned a lot on how things worked. Here is my report card for the three examples I shared:  

• After 3 to 4 experiments and finishing up all the eggs in the house, my best friend and I believe the hair mask worked. Our hair sample grew an inch after holding it hostage for 6 hours in that stinky aluminum foil. We measured the length of hair with a ruler. No need to repeat this experiment again. Take my word for it.
• My friends were not able to test the flying mechanism we invented. They were seen on the rooftop just before takeoff and one of their moms came at the last minute (during count down) pulling them both from the edge. I was waiting in my nearby home ready to put on my balloons and plastic bags before flying again from the backdoor so not to be noticed. After waiting for 30 minutes for a no-show, I knew something went wrong and thought they must have decided to jump in the pool instead.
• The original oven idea started with just heating our foreheads on the stove top so that we can show our parents we both had fever and cannot attend school that day. We then worried about burning our hair or that the rest of our bodies wouldn’t “heat up” properly and that our moms would touch our neck instead. My friend crawled inside the cold oven and I was supposed to turn it on. I couldn’t figure out how to start it. So I went to ask an adult. The adult was not thrilled by the idea at all. We stayed at 37 degree Celsius and couldn’t skip school that day. 

I know you have plenty of stories from your early experiment years that explains how your brain worked in different ways. What happened since then? Where are your experiments now?

Do you honestly think you now know better?

😉

Refreshingly yours,

Randah

A year ago, on a day very much like this day (yet feels a decade away), I wrote in this diary.

I asked, what if you designed your ideation exercise according to your money saving mentality?

I had plenty of responses, some of you were curious on how to do it, others enjoyed the insight they received and some didn’t see it relevant at all.
So here it is again, with some further clarification.
Let me know if it clicks this time, or not. Feedback is always the best way to develop ideas.

How do you save money?

Do you have a certain percentage of your salary put aside? Or do you have a fixed amount that you save regularly? (assuming ofcourse you’re in the habit of saving money and not spending it on every smoothy combination you can think of)
If you want to increase your idea fluency and reduce your decision fatigue at the same time, make a connection between both.
Use the same system you have for increasing your savings account to increasing the number of ideas you produce per challenge.

For example,
You either put aside 10% of your income to be saved every month or you add $50 a-week that goes in automatically. Let’s say at work, you have one week to sort out a pressing challenge. Either dedicate 10% of your time (half-a-day in a full time job) just for generating ideas, or you don’t stop until you get 50 unique ones. Every single week.

Once you stop deciding that it’s worth your time and simply follow your process, your brain will start compounding ideas regularly and automatically. You’ll end up feeling rich and highly trusting your creative muse.

Invest early. Save regularly. For both money and ideas.
Happiness multiplied,
Randah

“People don’t get talker’s block, walker’s block, plumber’s block… There’s no such thing as a writer’s block”. Those were Seth Godin’s words in one of his prompts in Akimbo’s Creative’s Workshop.

If we write daily, he suggests, regardless of the muse arriving or not, sooner or later our subconscious will help us write something that is really good. You simply do the work of writing and let the practice sort out the details.

Same advice goes to generating ideas at work.

To summon the muse, on demand, you will need to get into the habit of ideating constantly. Finding the tools or the best way that fits you is important to take your brain into this uncomfortable, yet highly creative level of producing robust ideas for challenges you’re facing daily.

People are held back by the fear of being blocked, of not moving on, or looking indecisive. When the reality is, they block themselves. 

If you accept the first ideas that come to your mind because you are focused on getting results quickly, or you can’t think of anything better, instead of producing good and imaginative solutions, then you’re building your own idea block.

This block will ensure your creative ideas don’t visit you easily the next time you want them.

And so, the cycle continues. It’s a man-made illness caused by our lazy brains and our high dependency on the muse. It doesn’t have any power over you. You are in control of your mind and the ideas it makes.  

Practice on producing more ideas than what you show the world. Don’t settle for mediocre ideas.

Here’s to breaking your idea-block barriers,

Randah

p.s. What’s your idea quota per challenge and how do you go about generating them?