It’s easy to think that your best bet for coming up with creative ideas is full bore, lobes-to-the-wall thinking. You’re right. And you’re wrong.
Throwing megawatts of creative energy at a problem or opportunity is certainly a great way of solving it, or at least making a lot of progress against. But to do this for long periods of time is hardly the most efficient way of finding huge ideas, and often not the most effective way either.
I believe the best method of coming up with fresh ideas is on again, off again thinking, where the off time is as important as the on time. And any of the things you think about when you’re away from the problem can actually help you solve it, as they act like bumper posts on a pinball machine, diverting the direction of your thoughts, setting up all kinds creative possibilities against the problem you’re, ahem, “not” working on at that moment.
Yeah, it sounds kind of wacky, but here’s how it works.
When you’re working on a problem head on, so to speak, it’s your conscious mind that’s doing virtually all of the work. Your conscious mind is what you’re processing on the conscious level - mostly your observations, knowledge and recollections. Even when you’re trying to imagine new things, what’s the raw material for the new thoughts? Stuff you know. I mean, you can only think about what you know, right?
Well, the conscious mind is quite disciplined by nature. It likes order. It likes to make sense of everything. This is a good thing most of the time. It keeps you on he right side of the road when you’re driving. It helps you deliver your work on time. But when you’re using this orderly machine to find new ideas, yes it can serve you, but it’s like a car in perfect alignment, whether you’re steering or not, it tends to go where it’s pointed. So your thoughts tend to be linear, therefore predictable.
There’s another side of your mind that is a lot less disciplined, much less predictable. That’s your subconscious mind. Where we can only process a mere seven or eight thousand bits of data a minute on the conscious level, we are processing literally billions of bits of data on the subconscious level at any given moment. That’s an absolutely immense well of possibilities to tap into.
Instead of an orderly arrangements of thoughts that form ideas, where the default position is making sense; putting subject before predicate, matching shirt with pants, driving in your lane, etc., the subconscious mind is a demolition derby of data crunching. In subconscious processing our mind is free to “think” things that don’t necessarily make sense. Your dreams are a pretty good window into those kinds of thoughts.
Bringing this back to the main topic of this article - the on/of method of thinking - when you’re “not” thinking about something consciously your subconscious mind is free to toss around some ideas on the subject in that gigantic thought auger where anything goes. So when you’re not using the conscious linear method you’re simply more likely to have fresh combinations of data that materialize as new thoughts.
Then you need to be open minded enough to recognize a worthwhile idea among the LSD trip-type thoughts that are just randomly swimming through your mind.
Malcolm Gladwell spoke to this tuning in to flashed of inspiration in his bets selling business book Blink! The ideas come for all of us. But it’s only the truly inspired minds that seem to pick up the messages regularly and turn them into fresh business ideas.
Of course, we all have this “gift,” that of getting ideas seemingly out of nowhere. You know, the ideas you get in the shower, when you’re on the commute, or doing your daily exercise. These are the “off” times when your subconscious is “on.”
In this era of heavy workloads and pressure to deliver in less and less time, and all sorts of time crunches, doesn’t it just make sense to use that immense power of the subconscious mind to get more out of your thinking?
Tom Edison, the American who still holds the most patents for new ideas about a century after his active years, believed strongly in the power of this type of thinking, particularly in the space where conscious and subconscious almost exist at the same time - during nodding off or waking up times. He routinely tapped into this resource as he took many naps a day. But more than just “sleeping on it,” he actually held a heavy object in his had at his side as he dozed off, then when he lost “consciousness” and dropped the object to the floor, the noise would wake him and he’d write down the thoughts that he could collect during that moment.
You don’t have to be quite so fanatical with this process. All you have to do is work on a challenge, then leave it to work on another challenge, go look out the window or go grab a cup of coffee.
Oh, you already do this occasionally, do you? Even better, then do it more consistently and you’ll be giving yourself even more opportunities to
get fresher ideas in a more efficient manner.
For readers who have been through my Do-it-yourself Lobotomy creative thinking workshop this is similar to the tool we use called “Ask the question early” (see my article from last November Jump start the creative process).
A lot of this stuff is a long way from rocket science. All you have to do is do it.
Alt head: Turn your creativity off for greater performance.
