The truth about running out of ideas

I have always thought that ideas are generated by investigating and analysing the environment. Either professionally or socially we are stimulated by trying new experiences and thinking about how to solve different problems. We often come to creative ideas by having a clear mind and full focus — eyes on the prize.

Personally, I always enjoyed finding a process or strategy that is not working to its expectations at work and zoned out for days in a desire to find solutions to it. I didn’t need too much time to get creative but the reason was the fact that I was always looking, keeping close attention to how were things being done so far. Usually, challenges were easy to spot in advance and the constant reading and analysing of businesses were helpful.

However, there was a recent personal encounter and challenge I had to face and realise that creative ideas were not unlimited. I had to create a personality for one of the key characters in my book but the problem was that I was struggling with where this character was to be influenced by other people and if that would have changed them. Usually, I’d ask myself a simple question — have I seen this somewhere else before? But the problem was that I was writing a story I haven’t seen and there were tens of ideas about where the character’s personality was going. I had to make an informed decision without making the personality too recognizable and understood by the reader.

It was days after this challenge I came to a realization that has changed my perspective on the challenges many people face in their lives every day. Some more than others, but we all have to put our creative sides to society at some point in our lives. Although, we face a lack of inspiration and ideas we need to keep going and give our maximum attention to the overall picture. If we don’t make the right call this time, there will be another opportunity to do so, but to mitigate that risk we can go through a few checks:

• Have I encountered this before and what was the decision and its consequences?
• Do I know someone who will be able to help me?
• How do I maximise the authenticity and minimize the repeatability?

If we manage to answer these three questions, when our creativity is low our productivity will prevail.