If you Struggle with Ideas, Read this Article and Follow the 3 Steps to have Some of your Smartest Ideas Ever

What do I mean by the simile ‘Ideas are just like a waterfall’. Ideas, like a waterfall are constantly flowing, 24/7, and yes I do in fact mean 24/7, because when I’m a sleep, that’s when my brain is most active, I think for other people it’s when there showering, that’s where the term ‘shower thoughts’ comes from, but I wouldn’t know, I prefer baths over showers. Back on track, if you take a geography class, you do know that waterfalls do eventually run out of water (or H2O for you science class lovers). And just like waterfalls, our brains can run out of ideas, that’s what I meant by that analogy. Now read on to refuel your brain with ideas.

1. Using Media to Influence Ideas (without ending up in court)

Also this is not legal advice. Media, one of the most positive but also one of the most negative things on Earth, for all its downsides, it also has a lot of upsides. Many key elements used across medias, have been used thousands of times, but slightly tweaked every time. Examples of media for the unaware are: Movies, books, video games, and social media videos. Obviously, using other people’s media does enters legal grey area with copyright law. I’ll be using one of the most popular game franchises Super Mario Bros, and most of the traits will be taken from the 1st game. I’ll be looking through the lenses of a video game developer or a video game publishing company, you can make the game a plat-former, you can have the games main goal to be to save a damsel in distress and you can have the protagonists be brothers. But you can’t just copy the whole game on a 1:1 ratio. Like the villain can’t be a turtle named Bowser, the damsel in distress can’t be royalty named after a fruit, preferably peaches, plums or grapes (because they either begin with P or have elements of pink and purple in them), you can make the character growth different, the setting and atmosphere different, the plot lines different and a bunch of minor details, like the main character’s favourite food being French Toast. So the To Long Didn’t Read is use media as a base but build upon it and alter it so it eventually becomes a snowflake, where the two games share the same mould but are very different.

2. Using the Smallest Day to Day Experiences as Big Ideas

You know ants are really small, but can carry over 2 times their body weight, the smallest things like pouring your morning coffee can be small but big enough to create its own idea. Let’s use the pouring coffee example and run with it. You can make a game where you are a barista (working at an unnamed coffee shop with inspiration from Costas and Starbucks). Where what you do is pile coffee into mugs and sells cakes and other pastries to your digital customers. It could be similar to the roost mini game in Animal Crossing New Leaf, where you help Brewster make coffees and have to listen to your customer’s preferences. Also because it is such a small idea, the amount of effort put it could range from 0.1% to 110%, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try but smaller ideas don’t require as much effort as like Super Mario Odyssey did. This shows that the day to day, repetitive actions, can make the most boring things into the most helpful inspiration which may blossom into a beautiful big career.

3. Ask for Help

As much as I don’t like asking for help, I still do believe it is key to finding good ideas, the two steps I just provided may be helpful but only on the circumstance that you haven’t already attempted to use it. Reading this article is already following this step. Reading articles isn’t the only way you can ‘ask’ for help. You can watch videos, they can be less then 1 minute, 1 minute, 10 minutes, an hour, even a day if you have that sorts of patience, you can enrol yourself in an online course, obviously from an economic standpoint it might not be affordable. One last way of ‘asking’ for help is using AI, AI is the sharpest double-edged sword known to man, it can be helpful but also spread misinformation, so you must always be careful and fact check it on websites like Google, Safari and Bing. And obviously, if you feel comfortable you can directly ask your friends and family for help and either use their ideas or build and tweak them.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this article, I hope this get your creative juices flowing. Enjoy the rest of your day