Struggling to come up with creative ideas? Try this.

I am going to suggest all IH to target market innovation rather than technology innovation.

If you want to come up with new ideas, check out these two posts — they cover everything you need to know. I bookmarked both. They've been immensely helpful.

• How to brainstorm great business ideas by @csallen
• Tech Startup Ideas: How to Generate a Great Idea by @indiejames

I previously wrote about a slightly different, more long-term approach, targeted towards programmers (but may also apply to others): https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-programmers-find-their-startup-ideas-a0492641d6

I have found painting to be extremely helpful in getting the juices flowing. And I am not a very experienced artist. I just like showing up at the canvas with 0 expectations and playing. This serves me well in other areas where I have creative blocks.

I live near Maine, and there's an awesome spot in the middle of the woods that I love going to anytime I feel stuck on something I'm working on. There's something about getting out into nature that really helps get the creative juices flowing. Thanks for this!

I usually just throw a bunch of ideas on paper. Like I just put on music and then as corny as it sounds a dance in my room to get as relax as possible. For some reason this really helps me get into a flow state. And then I just start creating ideas and building on top of them after I'm in a flow State because I'm comfortable listening to music that doesn't make me think about anything and dancing which is making me feel comfortable and safe in an environment where I can be silly and no one can see me lol.
After that I just write a ton of ideas like a ton of them, and then after that I just put little abbreviations next to each idea that fits into a specific category that pops into my head. Sometimes it breaks out into four or five categories and sometimes it's five or six, but this has been really helpful for me personally. Sorry if it's not as structured or cool, but I figured that I might as well just share.

Expanding your skillset is the fastest way to expand your creativity. You probably have a million ideas that you can't execute on, so you don't take them seriously.

Every time I learn how to do something new as a designer or developer, it immediately expands my "creative scope" into something much, much wider than it was before.

Fantastic advice, Lisa. And I really love the first nugget: Spend time in nature!

There is an amazing book called the The 3-Day Effect, by Florence Williams. It dives into the physical, mental and emotional phenomena that occur within humans when we return to nature and immerse ourselves in it for 3 or more days.

She demonstrates through scientific study that people come back from nature with more creative energy and focus, which helps them better accomplish tasks, solve problems and create.

Basically what happens when we spend 72 hours in nature is our frontal cortex — our executive taskmaster — gets a break.

"When the attention network is freed up, other parts of the brain appear to take over, like those associated with sensory perception, empathy, and productive day-dreaming."

One good book on coming up is Inside the Box.

Basically, when we think about coming up with great ideas, we think of how we can think "outside of the box".

This is a totally different approach where you create constraints on purpose. For example, imagine you've taken out a critical feature out of your software. You still need your software to do the job it's supposed to do. How will it do it without this critical feature?

I think these principles can be quite useful for someone making software vs. e-commerce where you're not that flexible with the final product.

Letting your mind wander is super important, and for good reason — your brainwaves actually shift into another state. Usually it's lower Alpha, but it can even go down to Theta. When your brainwaves are in these frequencies, you're in the place of the subconscious, imagination, inspiration, meditation, and flow-state.

You can drop into this state by simply letting your mind wander. But if you want to be a little more proactive, you can also do breathwork, exercise, meditate, binaural beats, etc. Fascinating stuff!

I think the problem that we have in the wbe space is that we have too many ideas and tend to lose focus...

We do this exercise as a team of coming up with say 5 intentionally 'bad' ideas, as a way to get you relaxed and your creative juices flowing. Often they end up inspiring some solid good ideas too.

"In a productivity-obsessed world, mind-wandering has a bad reputation," writes Clifton Mark for CBC Life. "The ideal is: focus like a laser beam, blasting to-dos off of your list." <-- well said. It's an individual decision and mindset shift, but it's a societal problem.

My mind wanders a ton, but not always to the right places. It tends to happen when I'm lying in bed and I start to think of the errands I didn't manage to run that day and my to-dos for the next day. Rationally, I know it's not constructive (they only make it more difficult to sleep), but it's not easy to make these thoughts stop in practice. The article argues it's a good thing to let your mind wander - but the things I'm 'wondering' about aren't inspiring any sort of creativity at all...they're just stressors.