Where to Look for New Ideas That Spark Your Creativity

The key is knowing where to find them…

“What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.” — Jonas Salk

No idea is truly unique, new, or unexplored. But somehow, we feel inclined to discover new things and come up with extraordinary ideas. At the very least, we want to provide a different angle to a previously discovered and discussed topic.

New ideas are almost always built off of previous thoughts, so by asking the right questions we will discover new truths, theories, angles, facts and ideas.

Asking the right questions is the starting point for creating something original. Asking the right questions is half of the solution.

Find ideas in the already discovered

When we try to think of something new, we will have a very hard time getting anything productive done unless we look at previous discoveries, ideas and thoughts.

Our minds are very bad at finding new things from the unknown. We like to look at problems and take steps that we know will provide a solution.

This is why it is often helpful to find inspiration before we begin creating something new.

Coming up with something new is very difficult to do when we don’t have any clues on where to begin. What we can do instead is to look at what has previously been covered and start exploring. We might find ideas when we look at something with our own eyes and perspective.

The possibilities are quite literally, endless

When we push the possibilities further than what we know, when we push the boundaries and change the angle of already existing ideas, modifying what we already know; that is known as the adjacent possible.

This concept proposed by Stuart Kauffman consists of anything and everything that is just out of our reach. In other words, the adjacent possible are things that are one step further from what we already know.

When we develop and grow, and when we meet new people, read new books, learn new things; we expand our horizons. When we do all of this, new things become possible. As we learn new things, the possibilities will keep expanding.

Our knowledge and life experience expand when we learn new things, which opens up new possibilities that we couldn’t previously predict.

The adjacent possible never ends, because it keeps getting reshaped and modified by our actions and choices, so there will always be more to discover.

Research for inspiration

Because our brains often need something to go off of when creating something new, we need to research and learn what is already known before we explore and discover.

Researching in this sense usually means listening to a speech, searching for problems, watching videos and movies, reading articles, or looking for creativity. We tend to feel inspired when we see other people doing something creative.

Once we’ve found something interesting and we’re presented with information that might lead to new ideas, we do one of two things.

We will either revisit the past, follow old patterns and recreate something similar through what has already been found, or we go off on a new adventure, explore and create something completely new and unique.

Since it’s a lot easier to improve on someone else’s idea than it is to begin something from scratch, we often find ourselves going down the first path.

Don’t let go of doubt

How we receive an idea is crucial to understand if it’s a good one or not. If we’re given an opportunity, and settle for what is given to us without questioning the other options, we won’t find out if there are better alternatives out there.

We must always doubt anything that is provided to us, always question the existing and always look for a different alternative.

By using our initiative and doing just that, we will open ourselves up to new possibilities and take the adventure route rather than the already-explored route.

When we question what we’re given, we take the adventurous route that often leads to a more creative outcome.

Whenever we feel doubt for anything, we should not let go of it. Questioning it and finding a different alternative and finding out if that one isn’t good enough will help us discover new paths and ideas.

We don’t have to think like an original

People who procrastinate wait until the last minute to do something, only to be in such a rush when they eventually get around to doing something, that they don’t have time for any creative or innovative ideas.

The people who are opposite of procrastinators, who feel the stress of getting something done months before the deadline, are also in too much of a rush to be creative in their thinking.

The key is to be somewhere in between. It might be a good idea to understand what needs doing, and put it off for a while. That gives our minds time to revisit that thought, again and again, and that is when we actively think about what needs doing.

Moderate amounts of procrastination allow us to have the thought in the back of our minds long enough to come up with creative and unique ideas. By giving ourselves time to think, we open up a wide range of new possibilities and ideas that we otherwise would be isolated from.

“You call it procrastination, I call it thinking”

— Aaron Sorkin

Self-doubt and idea-doubt

When we run out of ideas, it’s easy to think that we’re simply not good enough and that all our ideas are useless.

The thing is, most of our original ideas, thoughts, and first drafts will be crap. That just means that we haven’t found the motivation we need to keep going.

The difference between self-doubt and idea-doubt is the willingness to try. Self-doubt will lead to a lack of confidence while we question ourselves and our abilities to do something.

When we question if we have what it takes to get something done, we might avoid trying altogether.

Idea-doubt is different. This is when we don’t know if an idea, thought or decision is going to work out the way we hope, but we don’t lack the confidence to try.

Idea-doubt doesn’t hinder us to try new things as self-doubt does.

Speak up about our ideas

Chances are that we’ve all had an idea that we were too afraid to act on, that was sitting in the back of our minds while we thought “should I give this idea a try?”

The answer is always yes.

We’re often too afraid of what other people will think of us if we present a dumb idea, so we refrain from even trying. We’re afraid of sounding stupid, but most importantly, we’re too afraid to fail.

Failing is a great part of life because it means that we dared to try in the first place. If we never try, we will never have the opportunity to succeed, either.

We must exploit all our ideas, good or bad, and try to create something out of them. If it doesn’t work out, we should find another idea and try again. We need to give many bad ideas a chance before we find a few good ones.

Consuming quality content

As I mentioned, we need to go through a boatload of bad ideas before we can find the good ones. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to find them, it just means that we need to stay committed.

To come up with creative, innovative ideas, we need to consume content that helps us feel inspired. We need to make sure to consume what we want to create; quality.

Once we find an idea that might work, we need to execute that idea as far as we can to make sure we don’t leave anything behind that might be of value.

If we drain any idea we have until there’s nothing left to discover, and use every possible perspective to view that idea, we will find relating ideas that can take us down a whole new path.

If we can’t come up with any new ideas, we should try to meet new people. Everyone has their own stories and discoveries, so learning from others is a great way to gain knowledge and ideas. Almost all ideas are created from the edge of what we already know.

“Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.”

— Brian Chesky

Ask questions

Lastly, a crucial part of coming up with new ideas is to ask all the questions we can think of, and then some.

No question is wrong, bad or stupid, because if we ask, we might find the winning question that brings us an answer full of inspiration and ideas. If we never ask anything, we will never learn anything.

Ask why, and ask for specifics, ask about lessons, ask for the journey, ask about the idea, ask for more details, ask for emotions, ask for more questions to ask, and ask those questions as well.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein