Creativity

A lot of business owners are looking for an inspiration for a new product idea, marketing plan, or simply a new design. They just feel that they aren't creative, and don't know how to be inspired. Here are a few easy tips.

1) Know your schedule: If you are a morning person, and you feel most alive/inspired/awake early in the morning, this is your time. Try waking up a little earlier and writing down a few thoughts that are NOT what you would usually think about. Creativity is nothing more than thought paths that we haven't taken before, and noticing the journey.

2) Let your subconscious do the heavy lifting. Joe White, a serial entrepreneur in Colorado, used to write down the top ten things that he wanted to do the next day just before he would go to bed. Then, while he was sleeping, his subconscious would start working on the list. When he woke up, before he got out of bed, he would just start jotting down his thoughts and ideas. He was one of the most organized people I have ever known, and he did more before 9:00 than most people did all day.

3) Read things you have never read before. Go to www.stumbleupon.com, enter your interests, and stumble away viewing sites that are wildly eclectic and totally different from anything you have ever seen before. Some will make you think, others will make you quickly click on the "stumble" button, leading you to new adventures.

4) Make a planned attempt to be creative. Use the "reticular activator" section of your brain to help you find answers that you hadn't even thought of before. (Think back to the last time that you bought a car. What color? What make and model? When you did that, did you suddenly notice all of the other cars that were just like yours? That is the "reticular activator" noticing new things, and suddenly finding them everywhere. It is one of the brains most powerful...and under-appreciated tools that allows you to notice things and be creative.) In other words, write down what you are looking to achieve, and suddenly...you will find it. If you don't know what you are looking for, you will never even come close to finding it.

5) Don't cherry pick ideas. If you do this diligently, you will generate 50 ideas that are terrible, for every good one. However, that good one might be a million dollar idea. Write them down, expand them, go into different applications of the idea, expand on those, write down their different applications, and expand on those, and then set it aside for a few days. What you will find, when you come back to it, is that the first idea probably stunk, but the tangential ideas that came out of the first one were better, and became better with each tangential turn. Don't be afraid to take the bunny trails when you are brainstorming, but record the journey, and revisit. Use your subconscious and the reticular activator to really ramp up the process.

6) Write when you are asleep. I will suddenly wake up at 4:00 in the morning, have a brilliant thought, and before I fully wake, I will write it down...and then go back to bed. When I am fully awake, I can then explore this fresh new idea, that was unemcumbered by common sense and logic. It had the freshness of a dream. Use the tools above to flesh it out, and explore the possibilities.

7) Find an idea partner that you can bounce these off of. A good brainstorming session will create ideas that are better than what you can create by yourself, and will lead you to action. (Ideas without action are just dreams. Ideas with action...change the world.)

8) Once you have written out your ideas in full, ask yourself, "What need does it fill?" "Find a need...fill a need" (Robots). If your application doesn't fill a need, then it is useless as a business application. However, don't throw it away, find a need that it DOES fill. Some of the greatest inventions didn't fill existing needs, but created something so fresh that the need became apparent after it had been invented. (VCR's, DVD's, Personal computers, cars, railroads, fire....)

9) Articulate the idea into a sentence. If you can't articulate it into one sentence, rethink it. The greatest ideas can be shared easily and expressed simply.

10) If you have developed your idea into a complete business application, now you need to bring it to market. That is where you need the Capital and Expertise of Brainstorm Capital Group to help you take it to the next level.