Mitch Ditkoff's article, 14 Ways to get Breakthrough Ideas, offers readers fourteen ways to grasp, hold and generate new ideas or innovative thoughts. Through different approaches, which people do not really use in their daily life, Ditkoff suggests that people can use these ways to brainstorm different ideas.
Whether these approaches work or not is depending on each individual readers themselves. Personally, I feel these approaches are more likely to teach readers how to grasp or hold the flash ideas people have in their brain rather than really inspiring readers. Or, it is more like practices to think differently and have new ideas through these differences.
The first suggestion, from my point, is a good one. I agree that many people just let their fascinations go. The nature of fascinations is a charming idea that attracts our own attention first. However, I think many people have a wrong ideology toward our own fascinations. I am a fitting example. When I have some imaginations about some thing that probably will not happen in the real world, I will deny the innovative parts of my imaginations and then totally throw my ideas away because that idea is not practicable in real life. So I will come up with other ideas, then I will throw these ideas away because of the same reason- not practicable in real life. This cycle repeated. My ability to think differently keeps getting fade. How can people develop an idea if that idea even could not attract our attention first? How can other people find our idea fascinated if we are not even fascinated by our idea? I am almost completely agreed with Ditkoff’s opinions about fascinations, which include many potential possibilities. Next time, when I have some ideas really grasp my attention, I will just let my brain works on them instead of letting my ideas be scared away.
The fourth suggestion, which asks readers to make connections, is another smart way to generate creative ideas. I appreciate the example the author provided in the suggestions. Car plus banking is drive-in banking. We have drive through for many other things that convenient people’s life and bring more business to different companies. I am sure when the drive-through just came to people’s daily life, it gave people a fresh try to something new and also changed people’s traditional ideas of buying things. A lot of time, people are just too lazy to make connections. Also, the ideas or final products generated by making connections are more likely to be practicable than other wild ideas people generated through other approaches. Making random connections on differently things wouldn’t hurt if we only think about them. If we don’t even think in this way, it is not only connections loss, but also innovations loss as well.
Hanging out with different group is the suggestion I don’t really agree with. I do understand if Ditkoff wants readers get inspirations from other people’s view, from the people that readers don’t really communicate often. I can’t deny there is a chance people can get inspirited by their other friends, but I really how reliable it could be. I believe that many people are inspirited in the conversations or in the communication process. If people don’t really hang out with the other group of people, communication will be a lot harder than we think. If people fail to have good conversations, I doubt the chance for each of them to get very different and charming ideas. I do understand when people are stuck with their ideas; their close friends not really can help them out because they probably hold similar ideologies, life philosophies and worldviews. Other different people’s philosophies, life attitudes can fresh their opinions. But I just couldn’t understand what if these two different people are not even able to make a conversation to talk those issues, how can they exchange their deep life values? However, I am sure we can never ever eliminate the potential chance.
I am going to do the prompt for suggestion 4.
Laptop IPad Picture Bed Oven Dishwasher Car Plane Moon Ocean
Move Eat Walk Think Read Drive Beat Produce Shake Rise
Stable Beautiful generous useful frequent happy fast unstable different similar
Let’s see what crazy and nonsense connections we can make at here:
The Oven eats the Dishwasher because the Oven is jealously with Dishwasher since the owner thinks the Dishwasher is more useful. Hm, we can have a Kitchen War at here.
The Laptop thinks IPad is beautiful so the Laptop wants to date IPad—Electronics’ romance!
Crazy but interesting ideas.
Easy to read, good synopsis of suggestions, i like the font, makes it an easy read
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