“The new oil is ideas. It’s all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in ideas space.” ~ Naval Ravikant

In the creator economy and online space, the individuals who will be rewarded most will be those who can:

1) Find interesting ideas

2) Capture those ideas

3) Curate, remix, and come up with new ideas.

Sounds simple, right?

In theory, yes.

In practice, it’s a bit more complicated.

Thousands of creators struggle with all 3 stages of this process, but especially the last component:

Coming up with new ideas.

In a world drowning in information, it seems every idea has already been thought of, fleshed out into a YouTube video, book, or 𝕏 thread, and posted all over the internet.

But the creative geniuses, the wizards, the innovators, and the pioneers are the ones playing at the edge of the game, and they often have subtle hacks and tricks to enhance their idea generation process and creative output.

Here are 10 simple ways to enhance your creativity muscle:

1) Learn the Rules, Then Bend Them

Frameworks and templates can be useful for learning how to play the content game.

But eventually, they must be transcended.

Once you begin to grasp the fundamentals of persuasive writing by using frameworks and imitating post structures, you can begin to step outside the frameworks, bend them, and make them your own.

True creatives do this regularly.

They know the rules so well, they have immense specific knowledge, and they’ve put in thousands of reps to the point where they can break or bend the rules.

Think of frameworks like training wheels.

When you’re learning to ride a bike, you need the training wheels to avoid falling over.

But there comes a point when it’s time to discard the training wheels.

You can’t experience the full experience of riding a bicycle while being limited by the functionality of the training wheels.

The same principle applies to any creative work.

Use the frameworks as training wheels, and once you have a solid understanding of them, begin to experiment with discarding them.

Too much use of training wheels keeps you robotic.

True creativity is fluid.

2) Become a Multidisciplinary Polymath

A big part of coming up with creative ideas is connecting ideas across fields and disciplines.

This is the argument for becoming a generalist - someone with a breadth and depth of knowledge across fields who can connect ideas from seemingly opposite domains.

This is what Charlie Munger means when he says to “construct a lattice-work of mental models in your head.”

By having a holistic understanding of the world - by studying psychology, human nature, metaphysics, business, neuroscience, philosophy, marketing, sales, etc - you see the world differently than most people and make connections most people can’t.

Coming up with ideas is really just making new connections.

You increase your idea potential by expanding your knowledge across disciplines.

It’s also how you future-proof yourself against automation and AI and become an irreplaceable niche of one.

3) Create Your Own Concepts

Once you begin to study all of these different fields, try out methods from different teachers, and create your unique lens or way of doing things, you can begin to come up with your own concepts.

For example, if you have a unique way of getting into deep work, you can construct a new “idea” or “concept” around your method that will stick in people’s minds.

Ex: “Here is how I do 4 hours of deep work in the morning” > “4 Steps to 4 Hours of Focus”

See which one stands out and captures more attention?

Self-examine your way of doing things, identify abnormal or unique habits, and coin concepts around your methodologies.

This is a subtle but powerful way of coming up with new ideas and holding mental real estate in your audience’s head.

4) Pattern Interrupt

Creativity thrives on novelty.

But when we get caught up in the day-to-day cycle of robotic, linear tasks, our thinking follows this rigidity.

To enhance the creative process and enhance your idea generation process, you need to change your environment from time to time:

• Go travel

• Engage in deep play

• Take a day completely off social media

• Stay up late and go down rabbit holes

• Walk in nature

• Work at a new coffee shop

• Listen to a new focus playlist

Novelty is also a flow trigger.

Introducing novelty and unpredictability into your work and life on a regular basis has been shown to increase dopamine levels by up to 700%, a cheat code for accessing flow.

Flow is a highly creative state.

To access more flow, find more ways to incorporate pattern interrupts into your life.

5) 3-5 Hour Creative Blocks

You can’t get into a deeply curious, creative rabbit hole in 30-minute chunks throughout the day.

Your mind needs a continuous string of open hours to explore the depths of your curiosity and connect deep ideas.

You can have the block in the morning, at night, or mid-day.

What matters is having this block in your schedule 2-3 times a week.

This is where deep learning and understanding happen.

This is where you explore the depths of your curiosity and make connections not possible had you not given your mind the space.

And that’s a lot more valuable than 3+ more hours of linear, task-positive repetitive work.

6) Flow With Your Nature

Just like we all know, we have a circadian rhythm for sleep, but we also have circadian rhythms for attention and energy.

Some people are highly creative in the morning.

Others late at night.

If you’re naturally a creative night owl, but you’re forcing yourself to sleep at 8 pm and wake up at 4 am, odds are you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle in terms of creativity.

There are no prescriptions for creativity or genius.

You have to align with your unique nature.

It’s better to float downstream with your natural creative energy than struggle upstream by fighting against yourself.

*Pro-tip: Take this chronotype test to find your natural sleep and energy cycles.

If your schedule allows for it, try altering it so you have creative time when your biology is most primed for it.

7) Curate Your Consumption

Everything is information.

Everything you consume programs you.

If you feed your mind junk, your ideas will be junk.

The quality of your inputs determines the quality of your thinking.

It’s not to say there isn’t a time and place for entertainment.

But if you’re serious about becoming a creator and coming up with novel, creative ideas, consciously curating your consumption is a necessary lever to pull:

• Unfollow celebrities

• Unsubscribe from the news and politics

• Create your own “echo chamber” of creatives, educators, and motivational figures

8) Engage the Subconscious

The subconscious mind is your direct connection to the infinite, universal consciousness.

The universal consciousness is where “divine inspiration” or “creative insight” comes from.

There are 3 ways to leverage the subconscious mind to enhance your creative ability:

A) The Macgyver Method

This approach is simple.

All you need to do is write down the question or idea you’re working through (physically on paper, it engages more neurochemistry than typing), and go live life and trust the subconscious mind to come up with the answer.

While the conscious mind gets a rest from the problem and gets to focus on other things, the subconscious mind never turns off and thus will solve the problem for you while you aren’t thinking about it.

B) Ask your subconscious a question before sleep

Psychologist/ philosopher Carl Jung said to never go to sleep without asking your subconscious a question.

During sleep, your conscious mind turns off, and the subconscious takes over.

By priming it with a question, it’ll work on answering it while you sleep.

90% of the time, you’ll wake up with a new insight or the answer.

C) Keep a notebook or notes page next to your bed

Your dreams will often hint at the answer to the question you wrote down before you went to sleep.

But these insights can often disappear in a second if you don’t write them down.

Keeping a notepad or notes page next to your bed is a hack for catching the creative insight when it comes.

9) Elevate Your Mood

There’s one prerequisite for creative ideas:

Being in a good mood.

It’s nearly impossible to be creative when you’re in a bad mood.

If you think back to your most creative moments in the past week or month, I’d bet you were in an elevated mood.

Luckily, we can prime ourselves for this elevated mood through intentional behaviors.

Steven Kottler (author of "The Art of Impossible") refers to these as the 4 non-negotiables for creativity:

A) Mindful Awareness Meditation

Mindfulness trains the brain to be calm, focused, and nonreactive, three requirements for creativity.

Divergent mindfulness is the specific practice we want to focus on to enhance our creative thinking.

This practice is when you open your awareness and remove judgment.

You want to watch your thoughts and feelings as if they were clouds passing by in the sky, just observing, not judging.

This practice trains our minds and the default mode network (we’ll touch on this more later) to engage in abstract, divergent thinking without judgment or negativity.

B) Gratitude

Our brains have a built-in negativity bias.

This should make sense, as we’ve been hardwired through evolution to spot danger (think a lion or invading tribe) and seek out threats to our survival.

Gratitude combats this.

A gratitude practice retrains the brain to think positive thoughts, hacking our happiness, which is one step upstream of creativity.

C) Exercise

Exercise is a non-negotiable for every area of life, but especially creativity.

It does three main things:

Lowers stress and anxiety

Increases blood flow to the brain and cognitive functioning

Increases feel-good neurochemicals (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine)

Ideally, you want some type of physical activity every day as creativity is dependent on high brain functionality, and exercise feeds directly into this.

D) Sleep

Creativity requires an incubation period.

An incubation period is when you take your focus off of a problem and allow the mind to rest and recover.

While the conscious mind wanders, the unconscious engages in connecting thought patterns and coming up with new insights.

Einstein called this “combinatory play.”

And sleep is the most important and most accessible incubation period to tap into.

10) Capture Every Idea

You don’t have to be at the computer to write.

You can write all day:

• Between sets at the gym

• On a walk

• In your bed

• While having an idea at lunch

You can capture ideas everywhere, too:

• Something a friend says in conversation

• While watching a movie

• While talking to someone at the gym/coffee shop

When you hold too many ideas in your head, they take up your own mental real estate.

By writing down each idea as they come, you “empty” your mind and create space for new ideas to come.

Ideas beget ideas.

The more ideas you write down, the more ideas you’ll have.

This is how you create a snowball-like momentum of ideas, where they keep compounding to the point you have a massive snowball, or idea.

Here is how I set up my phone to easily capture ideas either into my notes (Personal Hub) or current projects (left hand side):

To sum it up, here are 10 ways to enhance your creativity:

1) Learn the rules, then bend them

2) Become a multidisciplinary polymath

3) Create your own concepts

4) Pattern interrupt

5) Hold 3-5 hour creative blocks

6) Flow with your nature; don’t fight against it

7) Curate your consumption

8) Engage the subconscious

9) Elevate your mood

10) Capture every idea

There’s a million more subtle tactics to come up with ideas and enhance your creativity:

• Introspection

• Meditation

• Reading

• Brain dump journaling

• Having an idea capture tab on your phone

• Setting up your Notion or digital workspace wisely

• Remixing pre-existing ideas

• More esoteric things (frequencies, plant medicines, ecstatic dances, etc)

But you have to go down the rabbit holes yourself and carve your own path.

These tactics will help, but it’s ultimately up to your own curiosity and your desire to be an idea machine.

Thanks for reading.

I’m getting back to writing long-form, educational emails once or twice a week (:

Talk soon,

Jack