How to be original?

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

How to be original?

  • Be flexible, beware about your bias and think in the context.
  • Generate more ideas (consistently). Even if your percentage of the quality ideas is too small, more ideas eventually will lead to more of better ones.
  • Put yourself into foreign and challenging environments.
  • Apply intentional delays and leave seeding time for brain. Whenever got stuck, stop doing it to come back later. Ah, don't forget adding enough knowledge beforehand so that there is enough material to chew to produce.
  • Think individually, not in groups. Groups can easily lead to well-known biases (selection bias: lack of courage to talk or missing titles, conformity bias: people tend to agree with others, etc.). However, use groups to get valuable feedback.
  • Challenge your ideas and try not to support them as much as possible. Try to find at least 3 negative/against reasons to ignore your ideas. By the way, sharing these ideas with a group and then asking their opinion on top of your against list is a more effective way of getting feedback.
  • Find the real underlying meaning and value of a goal. Five times asking why might be useful to extract this root. Relatedly, happiness is not a goal, just a byproduct of a meaning and actually, when you realize you're happy, by definition, you're not really happy. That's why happiness is a flow and if your answer is happiness somewhere, it means root isn't revealed yet and keep asking why.