Some people have told me that they are not creative. It usually stems from them thinking that creativity is an innate gift: some people are born with a brain that overflows with ideas at regular intervals, while others stay dry for most of their life.

In practice, I have found creativity to be a muscle. The more you try to use it, the easier it gets. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you get good ideas…

I do not think that you can make a habit of producing good ideas, but if you produce enough ideas, you will end up producing at least a few good ones; it is only a matter of time¹. Now, how do you produce ideas?

I have found two schools of thought when it comes to creativity. The first believes that you should isolate yourself from existing knowledge to have fresh, novel ideas. The obvious downside is that you might just waste time reinventing the wheel or coming up with novel, yet very bad ideas.

The second school suggests getting a wide knowledge of the field to which you want to contribute to be able to build on existing ideas. This is my preferred approach.

Thus, whenever I am approaching a subject, I first try to accumulate knowledge. Keeping files on ideas I find interesting appears to be a force multiplier to improve the quality of my output: the more tools I have at my disposal, and the more problems I can solve.

You first need to read or watch a wide sample of productions from your field. This will let you organize knowledge in categories (your first attempt will probably be very imperfect, but it is fine; you can always come back to it and reorganize things once you have a better grasp of your subject).

I usually use one text file per category, each filled with one paragraph per source that brought interesting knowledge to my attention. Your system might vary, but I like the simplicity of working off a folder of text files².

By doing so, you will start to develop your own ideas. This is where the magic happens. There are three ways a new idea usually pops into existence during that process:

• you might find a way to incrementally improve an existing idea,
• you might see a connection between two, previously unrelated, ideas (covering a wide range of ideas helps with this as it favors cross-pollination between fields) that comes together like the two pieces of a puzzle,
• you might even misunderstand something, realize your mistake, and discover that you came up with a brand new and very clever solution!

Once you have an idea, it is time to store your own ideas in a dedicated system.

For my ideas, I use one folder per category, containing one file per idea³ (rather than a file per category). Thus, I can easily find an idea and have space to expand on it.

I recommend taking the time to detail the idea (something obvious now might not be obvious in six months) and detail where it came from as well as all credits that come to mind. Knowing where your ideas came from is important both out of respect for the sources that inspired you and because it helps you realize which sources are inspiring you.

Also, having a good storage system lets you revisit ideas that were imperfect at a later point in time when you might have the correct frame of mind or knowledge to improve on them. This means that you end up producing more good ideas in the long run.

I developed the aforementioned process organically while working simultaneously in various problem-solving and creativity-centered fields (academic research, software engineering, and mentalism).

I want to stress that this process is not the only way to try and produce good ideas; it is just my preferred approach and an approach that is reproducible⁴. Since then, I have found that making a habit of thinking about problems, writing my ideas, and organizing them has been extremely valuable in all fields where I applied it.

I highly recommend that you try it. The few people that tested this approach were very surprised by their ability to both come up with new ideas and demonstrate a mastery of their field⁵.