It doesn’t take a genius to invent things. It just takes an understanding of something and the right mental models to think things through. You don’t even need a scientific background. People from all walks of life invent things every day.
An invention is a new solution to an existing problem. It can be as complex as a robot that does brain surgery, or as simple as a cardboard sleeve to keep your cup of coffee from burning your hand. Every problem or annoyance you experience in everyday life is a potential invention.
You might think that some people are more creative than others, but that is a myth. Creativity is the set of tools your mind uses for solving problems. When you add more tools or hone the ones you have, you become more creative.
Creativity is a skill you can learn and practice just like any other skill. And just like any other skill, you can become “rusty” at creativity when you don’t practice it often. In the following sections, I will offer a few tools for coming up with ideas, and also a few ways you can practice your creativity.
Turn it upside down
Take the standard solution to the problem and consider what would happen if you did the opposite. How would the solution look if you approached it from the opposite direction? How would it look if you turned it on its head?
For example: rush hour traffic in the city is horrible. There are too many people on the roads trying to get to and from work. The standard solution is to make the traffic on the roads flow faster or more efficiently during rush hour. But what if we did the opposite and got rid of the roads or the traffic? What if you sent the traffic under the roads instead of on them? How about over the roads? Or what if you got rid of the traffic altogether? Everyone can work at home. Or work times could be staggered.
Solutions to little problems
Inventions are solutions to problems. When we think of an invention, we often think of breakthrough technological solutions to major problems, like Thomas Edison and the light bulb. But the reality is, the invention of the light bulb did not happen with a single idea. It was the culmination of many ideas and experiments over several years that created the light bulb in its first commercially viable form. Even before the Edison light bulb, there were hundreds of other lighting solutions and even other inventors working on electrical lighting concepts. Then after the Edison light bulb, new ideas improved and expanded upon the idea over the years. The LED light bulbs of 2021 are vastly different from Edison’s original light bulb. This is all to say that Thomas Edison was an inventor who each day came up with incremental solutions to little problems. It is only in hindsight and looking broadly over the course of his entire career that we see the greatness of his work.
Edison had lighting in his time, but it came from burning fuel in a lantern or working only during the daytime. It must have been annoying for him to have to keep adding fuel to a lantern if he wanted to work past sunset. Think about all the little problems and minor annoyances in your life. Every little thing that causes even the slightest discomfort in your life is a problem with a solution that perhaps hasn’t been invented yet.
Are you annoyed that you have to wait five minutes for your oven to preheat before putting the casserole in? Maybe you can invent an oven that doesn’t need to preheat.
Your fingers are sore because you played video games too long? Sounds like you can invent an ergonomic video game controller with special buttons that doesn’t make your fingers sore.
Is it frustrating when people ring the doorbell while the baby is asleep? Can you come up with a solution?
Incremental improvements
Back to Thomas Edison… the light bulb was not a single invention created in one day. It was not that we didn’t have adequate lighting one day, then Edison created the light bulb and suddenly everyone has adequate lighting the next day. The problem of lighting has been solved over thousands of years with thousands of incremental improvements in technology that built over one another. The light bulb would not have been possible without previous inventions for harnessing electricity. Harnessing electricity would not be possible without previous breakthroughs in working with metals. Edison’s light bulb would look very different if the process for creating glass was never discovered. No idea comes from nothing. Every idea is built upon previous ideas.
Find something you really like and enjoy using. It could be your car, your phone, sticky notes on your desk, your purse, your coffee mug… anything. Now take a few minutes to come up with ten ideas for making it better.
For example, how can I improve the sticky notes on my desk? Will a different color work better? A different shape? Size? Can I make it easier to write on? Can I make them stick to my computer better? Or better fit any specialized purposes I use them for? Is there any waste that using them creates that I can eliminate?
Ten ideas a day
Speaking of coming up with ten ideas, this is an exercise that author and entrepreneur James Altucher promotes. He calls it the “daily practice.” The idea is that your creativity is like a muscle. If you don’t exercise your creativity each day, your idea muscle will atrophy. But if you make it a habit to exercise creativity every day, you will become more creative.
Each day (preferably at a set time so you can make it a habit), write down ten ideas. The ideas can be about anything. It helps if you start with some theme, like “ten ways I can make an extra $100 today,” “ten ways I can celebrate my wife’s birthday,” or “ten improvements Microsoft should make to Word.”
Muhammad Ali once famously said, “I don’t count my sit-ups; I only start counting when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count.” Similarly, the first few ideas you write will be the easy, obvious, and boring solutions. Once you get to the last three or four ideas, you’ll be getting more creative and really flexing those idea muscles. Those are the ideas that count.
Once you get the hang of running through ten ideas a day, how about trying a marathon? What is a big problem on your mind that you really want a great solution for? Try coming up with a hundred ideas to solve it. Let your mind run wild. Write down every idea that comes to you, no matter how impossible, weird, or stupid it sounds. Once you’re done, I guarantee you that at least one of those ideas is a top 1% idea!
One plus one is more than two
When people traveled a hundred years ago, they would pack their things in suitcases and get on a train. When they got to their destination, they would carry their suitcases to a hotel, check in, and put the suitcases onto a baggage cart for the bellhop to transport to their room. One of the most inconvenient aspects of traveling back then was carrying suitcases between places. Surprisingly, it wasn’t until the 1970’s before someone came up with the idea to combine suitcases with baggage carts to create “wheeled luggage.”
When you look around, you will find many tasks where you have to use multiple tools. Such tasks represent fertile ground for combination inventions.
For example, there was a time when you would have to carry both a pencil and an eraser separately to your desk. Then somebody came up with the idea to attach an eraser to each pencil.
As another example, back in the early 2000s before the first iPhones came out, I used to carry my flip-phone, my watch, a small camera, my keys, my wallet, and sometimes a small notebook and pencil with me every time I stepped out my door (and yes, I was a nerd, in the derogatory sense of the word). Today, I only carry my phone, wallet, and keys, because the functions of the other items have been technologically absorbed into my phone. I look forward to a day in the not-to-distant future when I can also stop carrying a wallet and keys around.
Any time you find yourself using more than one tool for a task, think about how you can combine the tools into one, or at least remove the need for using so many tools for the task.
Random inspiration
While you were thinking of possible things to combine, you may have run into some trouble thinking beyond the typical ideas that have already been overthought by countless people. That’s probably why it took so long before someone thought of putting wheels on luggage. While suitcase-makers spent their time thinking up better handles and more efficient pocket configurations for their suitcases, and baggage cart-makers spent their time thinking of ways to get more suitcases onto a cart and make it easier for bellhops to pull, nobody thought outside their own fields of expertise. One way to force yourself to think more broadly is to find inspiration from random places.
Wikipedia has a “random article” feature on its sidebar menu (you can also get a random article by pressing ALT+SHIFT+X while on their webpage). Try loading a couple of random articles and think of how you can combine the concepts as a thought exercise.
You can also do the same thing by picking random words from a dictionary. Or you can make your own list of technologies or topics, then use random.org to pick from your list at random.
Another idea I like for thinking outside the box is by reading books outside of your area of expertise. For example, if I were an auto mechanic, I might read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. It has nothing to do with fixing cars, but when I read it, I will read it in the context of being an auto mechanic. It might inspire me on ways to organize my work area, or eliminate tools that I never use to increase efficiency. Similarly, I could read a completely different book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki, and get completely different takeaways in the context of being an auto mechanic. It may give me ideas on how to grow my business and manage my assets.
Take your foot off the pedal
People often have breakthrough ideas while in the shower. Is it something about the chemicals they put into shampoo? Or steam going into your nose and touching your brain? Or your bare feet touching tile? I suspect not. I think people have ideas in the shower because it is one of the few places where they aren’t trying to “get work done.”
Your conscious mind is logical and it tends to filter out anything that seems too weird, unconventional, or impossible. While keeping your conscious mind in control most of the time is a good practice, every once in awhile you want to give your subconscious mind a crack at the problem. You have to take your mind off of the task at hand completely. Take a shower. Get some sleep. Go for a long walk. Meditate. Watch a stupid comedy. Whatever your preferred method, let your mind wander to wherever it wants to go. That’s where a lot of the creative magic happens. Once you’ve recharged your creativity, then you can give back control to your conscious mind and get back to work, solving those problems with renewed vigor.
…To be continued
This article is a portion of an early first draft of a book about ideas that I’m working on. If this article has inspired you, let me know or leave a comment. If I see interest, it will spur me to work harder at finishing this project.
[…] How Ideas Are Made […]