It’s the reason I still use iGoogle as my homepage. Even when I don’t have the energy to browse through 700 items in my RSS feed I still get random lines from some of my favorite blogs, one of my most favorite being the Seth Godin Blog. Today he surprised me with a list of ‘Random rules for ideas worth spreading’ and I’ve noted down a few of my favorites, just as a reminder to myself.

• Think big. Bigger than that.
• Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.
• Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
• Don’t poll your friends. It’s your art, not an election.
• Be prepared for the Dip.
• The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.

Most of these ‘rules’ are about finishing an idea – seeing it through to the end (or in case of the ‘the Dip‘, knowing when to quit).

Read the rest of the list over on Seth’s blog, there’s more than a few left worth reading! (and yes this was a little bit of a Seth Godin fanpost but I really feel he’s on a role lately with the ’shipping’ thing!)

It’s a cold January morning and work traffic is trying to squirm their way through the Washington, DC Metro Station. Amidst the crowd a violinist starts to play. Out of the thousand people on their way to work only a handful responds to the tunes filling the station. If anything, they briefly turn and look at the violinist before checking their watch or getting pushed along by their mothers.

After 45 minutes, the performer has gathered 32 dollars. Most of which donated by people who didn’t stop to listen but made a contribution none the less as they walked passed the violinist. Continue reading »

The ’secret’ to a successful brainstorm is of course the enthusiasm of the people involved in the brainstorm. All the brainstorming guidelines result in nothing if the participants don’t get into a creative mood and start adding to each others ideas, and are willing to offer ideas that beyond the obvious. This might seem straightforward, but getting in a habit of adding to each-others ideas (instead of criticizing) and offering risky, unconventional ideas (instead of safe and obvious suggestions) is not something everyone does naturally when they participate in a brainstorm.

In order to stimulate creative and constructive behavior that will get some real results, I often use a 10 to 15 minutes warming-up to break the ice and get the creative juices flowing. These creative warming-ups have several purposes: Continue reading »

Ideas come in various degrees. Ideas that seem relevant, ideas that seem original, ideas that are both relevant and original. After a phase of creating ideas, we can start to evaluate them. The most common type of evaluation is seeing how well the ideas do at solving the problem at hand.

Eventually there will be ideas that are neither original nor relevant (relevant meaning the idea is an effective solution to the problem), relevant and original, or just one of either. In general this divides the pile of ideas into good, bad and Great Ideas.
Continue reading »

Imagine a room. The room is your creative space. The space you have to move freely from idea to idea, and let creativity happen. This room could be a brainstorm session, or just some time to yourself to think. In a perfect world, ideas would just float in and out of that room, and your prepared mind would be able to make those connections that create value.

But people aren’t perfect, and therefore perfect hypothetical scenario’s aren’t perfect. Most of the time, ideas don’t start flowing freely through this creative space. Brainstorm magic doesn’t automatically happen, and even the best sources of inspiration can find fierce opposition making it difficult to create those Great Ideas.

The problem is most of these creative spaces don’t start out empty. People don’t come to a brainstorm session without presumptions or pre-made solutions they’ve already made up their minds about. You don’t start without presumptions about a problem and its solution.

These assumptions and ideas are the elephants. Continue reading »

One of the recurring themes on Crinid are age-old questions like: Where do creative thoughts come from? What determines one’s ability to be creative and why does this often seem so vague, fleeting and intangible?

A creative suggestion is found in ancient Greece, where they believed separate entities such as the Muses or Genius’ are responsible for our ability to be creative. Invisible to the eye, but always helping out by whispering new and original thoughts into the ears of their protégé’s. This romantic interpretation of creativity is presented beautifully in this presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert.

But inspiring as the notion of mythical creatures helping us with our ideas might be, the goal of Crinid is to make creativity more tangible, so we can learn and grow in our ability to create Great Ideas. And as creativity is such an important factor of a Great Idea, we should take a look at some of the alternative and more tangible theories on creativity.

We start our exploration inside the machine that I think is still responsible for our own ideas – the human mind. Continue reading »