Sure, there are numerous mind hacks one can use to get one-time results, but to attain mastery and fluidity at solution generation takes a kind of commitment, and a regular practice. The up side to this is that most people are not going to bother, so if you want to gain an edge you can easily do so, by creating a discipline for yourself. This can take many forms, the key being that you repeatedly challenge your brain to generate novelty on a regular basis.
James Altucher recommends writing 10 new ideas every day. This is good and simple approach, and James kind of believes that idea generation in itself will make one rich and successful. While that may be true in part, my caveat would be that being smart, and being able to generate a lot of ideas, even brilliant ideas, won’t on its own guarantee success. It may in fact make you less popular among your peers, who may envy you, feel threatened or just see you as weird. And you won’t always get credit for your ideas, as others who are better positioned can easily confiscate and take credit for them. Sometimes your great ideas are not going to be understood, as it takes others with open minds and imagination to appreciate a wholly novel and brilliant idea at the outset. It often takes a long time for people to fathom what just happened. The better and more significant your ideas are, the more trouble you can cause for yourself. Just ask Galileo and Tesla.
That said, it is something you can make work for you, not only in your ability to produce more and better ideas and solutions yourself, but to also gain an expertise in recognizing others’ good and great ideas, and how to build on them, and this type of collaboration can grow into something beautiful and unexpected, i.e. great teams, new products and business models that will help people adapt to the shocking acceleration of change we are experiencing during the new century.
It’s my humble but firm opinion (though I don’t have any hard data to back me up on this) that people who have some kind of artistic training or background are going to generally fare better in the idea generation biz, as well as see more clearly the whole system one is working with. I know a business owner who will only hire programmers with a musical background, and it’s been my experience that musicians make the best programmers. Many modern and postmodern poets, writers of fiction and visual artists tend to have an affinity for systemic thinking as their work tends to draw on and mirror complex patterns they have explored in the world around them.
This is perhaps only in part due to any innate talent, as there may really be no real thing we can point to and call talent anyway, but a number of minor propensities that somehow get linked together through practice. We all have the raw materials, it’s just that some are more compelled to explore and utilize them in ways that begin to form consistent mental circuits that may be a bit different from people who do other things with their time. The forming these currents is the key to having a brilliant and useful imagination. But again, this may be no salvation, at least in terms of having a superstar career. It is however a worthy discipline for anyone with the inclination, especially if you’re a geek like me, who thrives on it.
One of my favorite ways of getting the juices flowing is what I call Taking Dictation, which will be not be new to any of you who are familiar with art history at all, primarily Surrealism. In Andre Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, he defined Surrealism as:
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
He prescribed a practice we now call automatic writing, which is a form of writing in which one simply unloads onto the page anything and everything that comes to one’s mind without involving the critical functions. This process can result in some really bizarre nonsense, but keeping it on your regular to-do list can help you tune into your unconscious resources. Sure, you will produce a lot of seemingly useless noise, but you will also begin to discern particular voices, and choruses of voices, that are more useful than others. They will often be associated with particular moods and flow states that you will come to recognize and trust more as you continue to gain in depth. It is a great way gain an affinity and fluidity with that part of oneself that may serve as a font of many great ideas and perspectives, as well as a way to get to know oneself more, and even help to increase emotional intelligence.
It is especially during the moments when it seems like there is a conversation of many voices going on in your head that you can make use of the jam session effect, which can be a thrilling experience as the ideas that come through like a white-water rafting of your brain currents through a rapture of new possibilities. Take it from me, as its the cognitive equivalent of extreme sports – and definitely pays for itself once you get the hang of it.
You can always go back later, into the material you have written, which may seem to those less familiar with the process like sheer lunacy, and extract what is that may be useful that day, or at some point in the future. Sometimes, the gold may be hidden within the apparent nonsense, and that’s where the interpreting process, and the interweaving of present thoughts into the past material, can be a creative adventure as well, a kind of surfing and weaving of your entire sensory and mental representational systems into a mercurial flood of novelty and innovation.
My hat’s off to those who follow the path, because they will be among the folks who are making the future, whether knowingly or unknowingly.