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Ideas are a dime a dozen, and that’s on a good day.

What’s surprising is that knowing this we still spend an obscene amount of time trying to come up with the “perfect one.”

Whether it’s the game plan for our next socially driven widget, or the perfect slogan for our national advertising campaign — when we really need them, ideas are nowhere to be found.

The problem is not that good ideas are hard to find. The problem is that the process that we use you find ideas is so inefficient.

The Hardest Thing

When faced with a problem, most people will sit for hours fighting against themselves, hoping that somewhere amidst the dozen of still born concepts and the deeply obsessive ruminations a great idea will just fall into their laps.

What’s worse is that they are surprised when this doesn’t happen.

So where are they going wrong?

Where to begin . . .

There is only one perfect idea.

The biggest misconception that people have when trying to come up with an idea is that there is a correct answer.

More damning still is that they believe that all their other answers must be wrong. For most problems that we face in daily life, the choice is not between right and wrong — it is between bad, good and better.

Never tie your hopes and dreams to a single course of action. If you need to come up with four new slogan ideas, why not come up with 14? Even if a few of them are downright awful, you have a lot better chance of ending up with a diamond than if you focused all your concentration on the first four.

Going it alone.

The image of the nobel inventor, sitting alone in his lab, rolling out an endless string of amazing ideas does have a certain romance to it.

The reality is that most good ideas aren’t made this way. Most good ideas are the result of colloboration. You should be talking to as many people as you can about your problem. While they might not have a perfect answer, they almost certainly will have a perspective that you might have otherwise missed.

We must forge ahead!

You have to be willing to step away from the problem.

Intellectual fatigue can completely destroy our ability to see different angles of a problem. If you are running into a dead end, you might just need to sleep on it.

Often, the very best thing you can do with a problem that refuses to be solved is to stop trying so hard to solve it. The million dollar solutions almost always come when we aren’t actively looking for them.

What’s dead is dead.

The difference between a bad idea and a good idea is often a matter of phrasing.

Be willing to steal the good portions of bad ideas and use them to make your next solution better. Remember, coming up with ideas is an evolutionary process. Just because an idea has to die, does not mean the good parts of it can’t live on in its ancestors.

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The stickiest part of coming up with ideas is getting over the belief that it’s hard. We come up with great ideas spontaneously every day. It seems easy because there was no pressure for us to do it. Stop trying so hard, you may find that your next great idea comes just a little bit easier.

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