Want a consistent flow of creative ideas?

Creative work is all about ideas.

They’re your currency, and you need to be able to produce them on demand. It can be hard to feel like you always have new stories to tell, new ideas to pitch, new approaches and solutions. Yet some people manage to do this, consistently, without ever getting stale or repetitive.

With the rise of AI, this is what will make you irreplaceable: a steady supply of good ideas and solutions to your clients’ most pressing problems.

I’ve earned my living as a writer for more than 40 years. As a journalist, I interviewed thousands of creatives at the very top of their fields. Over the past 15 years, I’ve also coached hundreds of creative professionals. 

This is what I’ve learned about inspiration, and how to get a consistent flow of creative ideas.

Monitor your inputs carefully.

Read a lot. See as much good art as you can. Listen to great music.

Be open to new and interesting ideas. Watch films, documentaries, TV outside your usual genres, or from different countries and cultures. Listen to podcasts or audiobooks while you’re doing chores. Be open to opinions that are different to your own. (But avoid content made just to provoke, shock or upset you.)

Have great conversations with stimulating people. If this doesn’t happen naturally in your working life, seek out smart, interesting people and deliberately schedule in time to meet them, and exchange ideas. And remember: if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Consider this a fitness regime for your creativity. Better food, better exercise = a healthier body. Better creative inputs = better ideas.

Be more playful.

Go on play dates. Allow yourself to explore without an agenda and without needing it to produce something tangible immediately. 

Great ideas often come when two or more unconnected things marry in your mind. So stop judging, controlling. Practice being open instead, and endlessly curious. 

Then you don’t need to force ideas. They just arrive, when you’re least expecting them: in the shower, while you’re chopping veg for dinner, on a walk or bike ride, playing with your kids or with your dog. 

Play. Get messy. Enjoy the accidents!

Practice.

Find a way to regularly produce lots of ideas at speed. Don’t judge them as you get them down. Start with quantity, edit later for quality.

There’s an often-repeated story of a pottery teacher who asked half his class to produce one perfect pot over a term, on which their grade would depend. The other half were told that their success depended on how many pots they produced. Who produced the best work? The half who focussed on doing as many as possible. 

You might want to invest in a gorgeous new sketchbook or notebook. Then fill it, as quickly as you can. Or try James Altucher’s technique of training your ideas muscle by thinking of ten new ideas, every morning. 

Embrace failure.

You don’t have to be perfect, and you’re allowed to make mistakes. It’s how you learn. Sometimes, it’s also where the magic happens.

“I love being wrong!” said former Apple designer Jony Ive. “As a designer you’re always exploring what’s isn’t right. The ideas that didn’t work are part of the process. That isn’t failure, it’s just something we were trying out.”

Failing is part of the process. It’s what you do next that matter. If you’ve made a mistake that hurts people, put it right immediately. If you’ve failed creatively, learn what you can from it, then try again. Quickly.

Here’s director Quentin Tarantino talking to me about his first failure, and how he recovered from it:

Stay curious. Question everything.

Approach everything with childlike wonder, as if you’d never seen it before. Feel free to follow your curiosity, to go down rabbit holes sometimes.

As the prolific SF writer Isaac Asimov once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny . . .’ ”

Stay open to new experiences. In fact, plan them into your week. And never, ever be embarrassed to ask a dumb question. 

Chances are, everyone else is thinking it, and are too afraid to ask. Or they haven’t noticed there’s a question to be asked.

“It has to do with curiosity,” said the Novel-winning scientist Richard Feynam. “It has to do with people wondering what makes something do something.”

We all accepted that suitcases were things you lugged around. Until someone looked at them with fresh eyes, questioned how they could be better — and put wheels on them. 

And remember to rest, to take breaks. 

Inputs need time to ferment, ideas need time to percolate and cross-pollinate.

Sometimes the best way to solve a knotty problem is to do the research and thinking. Then take a break. Focus on something completely different for a while, and trust that inspiration will come.

Do all of this consistently, gently, without pushing or pressuring yourself to make it immediately fruitful or productive. And after a while, you’ll never be short of ideas again.