Louis Pasteur said that “fortune favors the prepared mind.” Ideas prefer the prepared mind, too.

So, it’s essential to be open to the possibilities that can pop up in every waking moment and even in your sleep when you dream. The best idea can come from anywhere, and often, it’s from the most unexpected place at the most unexpected moment.

Ideas seem to come in waves that you then need to incubate. They come from intuition and hunches. Your first reactions to solving a problem often turn out to be the best—once you vet them.

Reflection and incubation are essential phases in coming up with ideas or refining them. My best ideas come when my brain is resting—exercising, showering, sleeping—rather than consciously trying to work the problem. It’s not necessarily the “aha!” moment, but more of a discovery of an aspect that hadn’t occurred to me before.

Because of that, I’ve developed a couple of habits and approaches that I think encourage ideas. One is “quantity, not quality” in the early stages, and the other is distractions.

Now “quantity, not quality” sounds counter-intuitive. However, it’s one of my most effective techniques. When you have only a few ideas to explore, you haven’t done your work. Even though the first ideas are often close to the right one, my best ideas almost always come from saturating the problem with possibilities. So I try to think of every possible angle—even ones that don’t seem to make any sense at all—and then work it out from there.

Things like:

• Words

• Photos

• Books

• Internet research

• Sketching

• Pacing or going for a walk

• Percolation 

Distractions like these are also useful when you’re trying to break your thinking process. So are free association, cross-pollination of ideas, and combining things that are generally not combined but end up turning into something useful.

Some of the tools I use include outlining, mind-mapping, field trips, sketching, and competitive research. I even have a toolbox filled with kids’ toys that people mess around with during brainstorming. That loosens up their thinking and lets their brains work the problem at the subconscious level.

And books. To spur ideas that you typically wouldn’t think of, start reading about things that you “shouldn’t” be reading about because you’re supposed to be working on the problem. Books like the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy are beneficial for this.

Most ideas are only a few steps away from where you’re thinking right now. You need to kick those steps out of the way to get to the more significant ideas. That involves unlocking your mind, and it’s often through unexpected associations that this happens. Distractions help.

The final trick is to let your pre-wired prejudice go. Humans are programmed to think we already know the answer, which often gets in the way. Challenge the frame of reference that you think you know about any particular subject. Learning as much as you can and having a curiosity that’s almost nerd-like in its thirst for information.

The reality is that there’s no magic sauce to generate big ideas. They come from who you are as a person, your life experience, and your willingness to open up. For me, that means being a little bit all over the place because it allows my mind to free up and make associations that don’t seem right at the time, but that turn out to be golden.

It all comes back to learn as much as you can about the problem you’re trying to solve. When you’re operating from a position of knowledge, ideas have a better chance of being “the big one” that’s most appropriate to solving the client’s problem and making money for them.

My last point here is you can come up with a thousand ideas, but unless you execute on them, they’re useless. If coming up with “the big idea” is the hardest part, then implementing it is your next critical challenge.

And that’s what the work is all about.

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