The Basic Heuristics of Directed Creativity

1. Make it a habit to purposefully pause and notice things.
2. Focus your creative energies on just a few topic areas that you genuinely care about and work on these purposefully for several weeks or months.
3. Avoid being too narrow in the way you define your problem or topic area; purposefully try broader definitions and see what insights you gain.
4. Try to come up with original and useful ideas by making novel associations among what you already know.
5. When you need creative ideas, remember: attention, escape, and movement.
6. Pause and carefully examine ideas that make you laugh the first time you hear them.
7. Recognize that your streams of thought and patterns of judgment are not inherently right or wrong; they are just what you think now based primarily on patterns from your past.
8. Make a deliberate effort to harvest, develop, and implement at least a few of the ideas you generate.

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