Instead, it’s better to focus on small creative steps and use analogies to help connect ideas.
This post originally appeared onFast Company.
Where do great ideas come from, and how can you generate more of them?
You’ve tried all the recommendations, fromwaking up earlytowriting by hand.
But research shows that our hunt for a eureka moment may be in vain.
The transcripts showed that new ideas don’t come out of thin air due to massive cognitive leaps.
Instead,creativity is a series of small steps.
They also found that analogies helped lead from one idea to the next.
He gives the stock example of the similarities between the solar system and an atom.
Analogies come naturally to us.
This was indeed true for the designers.
In their brainstorming sessions, new analogies surfaced every five minutes.
This happened throughout the brainstorming sessions; ideas shifted and changed and morphed.
Analogies can also help us get out of a mental rut.
Shunn says our brains sometimes become fixated on an idea.
These can get stuck in your brain and prevent you from coming up with any new concepts.
“Those methods have worked both for novices and for experts.”
Things will kind of run dry."
You might not shout “eureka!”
Photos byclrmck(Flickr) andJake Boetter(Flickr).
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