How to Unlock Your Own Creative Genius in Thirty Minutes

If you’re feeling stuck creatively and can’t seem to come up with anything fresh, don’t worry. There’s a process for getting unstuck.

You know you’re supposed to brainstorm ideas. That’s obvious. But most people don’t know how to deep brainstorm and use creative persistence to punch through the creative blocks in their path.

Here’s how it works:

Start by brainstorm ten new ideas. It’s fine if you hate all of them. If you’re doing it right, you won’t use anything at of them on your list for your next project. This is a list of your weak ideas, the proverbial low-hanging fruit, the ones that aren’t likely to inspire you or anyone else.

Now brainstorm ten more ideas and write them down on a separate sheet of paper or in a different file. This list is probably better than the first. You probably had to stretch yourself a bit. You’re less likely to add clichés to this list since you’ve gotten those out of the way. Chances are that at least one idea on your second list beats every single thing on your first list.

Now it’s time to set this list aside and create a third, and this time there’s no upper limit. Write down everything you can think of until your well is totally dry. Now you have a decent brainstorm list that you can work from, and it’s probably better than anything you thought you could come up with.

Feel free to stop at this point. By going through three iterations, you’ve probably unblocked yourself. But if you’re feeling ambitious, if you want to come up with something truly original that no one else in the world might have thought of yet, stretch yourself and create a fourth separate list.

That fourth list is where your creative genius will appear.

“Giving up is the enemy of creativity,” Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

They know because they ran some experiments on students and proved that their test subjects drastically underestimated how many ideas they could think of. The students’ assignment seemed straightforward and easy. All they had to do was spend ten minutes writing down every Thanksgiving dish they could think of in ten minutes. Then they were asked how many more dishes they thought they could think of it they were given an additional ten minutes.

The average student assumed they’d be able to think of ten additional dishes—one per minute—but they actually thought of fifteen more. Researchers had similar results when they asked comedians how many punch lines they could come up with.

But there’s more to this story than the well-known fact that people tend to underestimate themselves.

After each study we asked a separate group of people to rate the creativity of the participants’ ideas. Across the majority of our studies we found that ideas generated while persisting were, on average, rated to be more creative than ideas generated initially. Not only did participants underestimate their ability to generate ideas while persisting, they underestimated their ability to generate their most creative ideas.

So don’t stop just when you think you’ve unblocked yourself and have a good enough working list of ideas. That’s precisely the moment when you really ought to keep digging. Genius lurks in your subconscious. Go forth and find it.