Creativity

There's a lot of fallacies about creativity. It's not about grabbing random thoughts. It's not something that people are born into.

Many people think it's impossible to force creativity, but you can. It's just that the common methodologies used to force people to do any kind of work is counter-productive in being creative.

There's a few key rules to being creative:
- Sit there and brainstorm, like you would do with everything else.
- Go for quantity, not quality. Don't even bother to filter anything. Save it for later.
- Don't evaluate anything, don't analyze, don't organize.

Creativity doesn't require active effort, but it does require time. You'd need to allocate some time for yourself to be creative. Drugs don't make people creative... it's all that lying down and thinking about nothing that makes them creative.

Try to not stay in the same field. If you're thinking about making an action game, don't think about common action games like Street Fighter or Ninjas or whatever. Think about other things. Maybe domestic disputes. Cavemen. Dinosaurs. How about miners trapped in a collapsed shaft, having to hold off dinosaurs and aliens or whatever? It beats the typical 'commando killing terrorists' kind of theme.

Note that 90% of your ideas will be crap. You'll have to filter them out later.

A key issue is that people often try to be anti-mainstream in order to be creative. This is also wrong. A lot of really good ideas just fork off mainstream ideas. The best inventions in the world are optimized versions of something that existed somewhere. By trying to limit yourself to non-mainstream ideas, you'll not only stifle the 'unsuppressable' side of creativity, but you'll also naturally produce a lot of bad ideas which won't work.

Perhaps the best way to encourage creativity is to learn everything you can. Especially if they have nothing at all to do with what you expect to learn. The world is all about patterns. Any invention is a pattern that works. Apply the concept of printing press to building automotives, and you'll get the assembly line.