Good, concise post! Though I think it'd be helpful to differentiate the different types of creativity - e.g.) creativity required to solve a difficult math question for which a solution necessarily exists may be a different type of creativity required to approach a problem for which you are not even sure the solution exists in the first place. For me, this technique is more helpful when approaching the latter-type problem than the former: for already-solved math problems, for example, I find it helpful to fully try out one approach until I hit a dead-end and then apply the insights I learned from that approach to come up with another approach that I feel may work better. I personally never found coming up with a bunch of approaches before trying out each one particularly helpful in this case.
I’m a massive perfectionist, and I find it easy to slip into the failure mode of generating the perfect idea. This is incredibly unhelpful, because this is paralysing in practice, and means I struggle to come up with anything. Any weak and half-formed ideas are discarded before they can be fleshed out into something worthwhile
Hold Off On Proposing Solutions does a great job elucidating what you've described here!
Introduction
A really common failure mode that I observe in myself and others is to get stuck and then give up. To be working on a problem, or trying to generate ideas, find it hard and stop looking. I find that this goes hand-in-hand with the far larger problem of being trapped within your preconceptions - to notice the obvious solution to your problem, the obvious life path ahead of you, the obvious thing somebody in your role should do, and never realising there can be anything more. I think this is a really big problem, because the world is large and complicated. The space of possibilities is enormous and the ability to search beyond what’s obviously visible is really valuable for noticing when you are wasting motion.
I think these problems are, at their heart, a lack of creativity. I think creativity is an incredibly valuable skill and, importantly, a learnable skill, not an inherent trait. This is a skill that I still suck at, but I’ve improved a lot at over time, and this post is my attempt to outline the approach that’s worked best for me.
This is obviously a useful skill in settings like doing art and research. But I’ve found it useful in a wide range of areas in my life. A few highlights:
5 Minute Timers
I think there are two main insights here:
Of course, as with any insights that take willpower to apply, the solution is not to try harder, it’s to systematise them! And my main tool here is to notice every time I want to be creative, set a 5 minute timer, get a blank document up or a piece of paper and generate solutions until the timer goes off.
This is one of my favourite life hacks, for both sounding so ridiculously simple that there’s no way it actually works, and being incredibly useful in practice. This lets me implement both insights in a super low-willpower way! I spend the full 5 minutes generating and, because I’m under a fairly sharp time limit, it’s easy to remain focused. This means my mind rarely wanders, and I can maintain the mental distinction between generating and filtering, there isn’t enough time to get distracted like that! And it forces me to continue past getting stuck, because it’s only for 5 minutes! If I really need to, I can just sit there for 5 minutes staring at a blank piece of paper. But, in practice, I always come up with something.
Further, this is something you want to be systematised - it should be a reflex. I try to always have a physical timer within arms reach (I recommend this style for great visuals) to make it as easy to do as possible (I also like the ability to say “Alexa, 5 minute timer”). And I’ve cultivated the habit of noticing any time I feel stuck, or out of ideas, or when I’m doing anything remotely important, and starting a 5 minute brainstorm. The fact that it’s 5 minutes, specifically, is pretty arbitrary, 4 or 6 minutes would work equally well. The point is to have a single default time, to minimise the activation energy of setting one.
Even though I’m fully convinced that 5 minute timers are awesome, an embarrassing amount of the time I still notice myself complaining about or dwelling on a problem without having spent at least 5 minutes trying to solve it! And I also notice this a lot in other people, to the point where one of my favourite questions to ask people is “have you spent at least 5 minutes thinking about this problem?”. 5 minutes is such a short amount of time, that I don’t think your answer to that question should ever be no. I think a great social norm, if you ever notice this failure mode in yourself or somebody else, is to set a 5 minute timer and have both of you think about the problem. (Anyone reading this has an open invitation to ask me this question if you ever think I’m not trying hard enough!)
Frankly, I find it somewhat depressing that anything as simple as this is so useful. And I think it’s reasonable at this point in the article to feel skeptical. So, if you do, I propose a test: Set a 5 minute timer, and make a list of problems in your life - things that annoy you, things you want to work on, things that could be better. And then, go through that list, and cross off any you’re confident you’ve spent at least 5 minutes of focused time trying to solve. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have an embarrassingly long list left over. I’d be pretty curious about what happens if you try doing a 5 minute brainstorm for anything left.
Alternate sources
Another great source of creativity is using other people! As Nate Soares notes, often the advice that feels obvious to me doesn’t feel obvious to somebody else, and vice versa. We all have our standard toolkits, and ways of seeing the world. And these vary a lot between people! Asking people for advice or suggestions is almost universally useful when you want to expand your horizons of possible ideas. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has given me a suggestion they thought was obvious that I’d never have come up with, but seemed instantly insightful when I heard it.
You can also use 5 minute timers in groups! Whenever I’m part of a group discussion, I think it’s extremely useful at the start to set a 5 minute timer, and have everyone generate ideas on their own, and then share. It’s super easy to get anchored on other people’s thoughts, and this ensures we can start out with a wide range of
Conclusion
I think being creative is a really useful skill. And that if you aren’t setting 5 minute timers for yourself, you’re missing out on some incredibly low-hanging fruit. Cultivating this habit has significantly increased my ability to be creative, and come up with ideas I missed on the first pass.
More generally, it’s difficult to notice in the moment to start a 5 minute timer. I think it can be useful to practice and explicitly develop the habit! I find it pretty consistently useful to try it on open-ended, introspective prompts (in, eg a weekly review). So, if this article has resonated with you, here are some examples I’ve found useful. I recommend picking a prompt that seems fun to you, and spending the next 5 minutes thinking about it! After all, the best time to start a new habit is right now.
Finally, if you’ve gotten through this entire article, and it doesn’t feel relevant to you. That you can’t come up with areas of your life where you’d like to be more creative. Then, well, that in itself feels like a lack of creativity. I’d be pretty curious to see what happens if you set a 5 minute timer, and try to generate places you could use these ideas.