Here is a simple 30-day experiment for strengthening your creativity.
Every day for the next 30 days, choose a topic—any topic—and write down ten ideas about it.
The exercise should begin to feel difficult around idea six or seven. That is part of the experiment. Your ideas do not need to be brilliant, practical or even particularly good. Don’t analyse or judge them while writing. Your only task is to reach ten.
I adapted this practice from James Altucher’s idea-machine exercise.
Use this simple template:
Today’s topic:
Ten ideas:
30 topics for your 30-day experiment
- Ways to improve my morning
- Skills I would enjoy learning
- Problems I could solve
- Small sources of additional income
- Places I would like to explore
- Experiments I could conduct this month
- Ways to become more curious
- Subjects I would like to understand
- Improvements to my home or garden
- People from whom I could learn
- Ways to use artificial intelligence
- Things I could create
- Ways to improve my health
- Questions I have never investigated
- Books I could write
- Videos I could make
- Ways to help another person
- Habits I could test
- Activities that give me energy
- Things I could simplify
- Possible future careers
- New ways to use an existing skill
- Places I could visit locally
- Lessons from a recent failure
- Things I would do differently
- Ways to make learning enjoyable
- People I could reconnect with
- Possibilities for the next decade
- Small risks worth taking
- Ideas for my next experiment
Why Write 10 Ideas a Day?
When I first tried this experiment, I added the template to my electronic diary and completed it as part of my morning routine.
The purpose is to train your mind to generate possibilities. Creativity is a little like a muscle: it becomes stronger when it is exercised regularly.
Writing ten ideas every day would produce 3,650 ideas in a year. Most will never be used—and that is perfectly fine. The aim is not to produce 3,650 brilliant ideas. It is to become more comfortable noticing possibilities and continuing to think after the obvious answers have been exhausted.
After practising the exercise for two months, I found that ideas began appearing more readily throughout the day. I also became more attentive to them. Generating ideas no longer felt like something that had to happen by inspiration; it had become a skill I could practise.
Try it for 30 days and observe what happens.
At the end of the experiment, ask yourself:
- Did generating ideas become easier?
- Which topics produced unexpected possibilities?
- Did any idea lead to an action or further experiment?
- What did you learn about your tendency to judge ideas prematurely?
Take your curiosity further
Generating ideas is one way to exercise curiosity and discover possibilities beyond the most obvious answers. In The Curiosity Advantage – How Lifelong Learners Thrive in the Age of AI, I explore how curiosity can help us continue learning, adapt to change and uncover new opportunities.
