Any weak and half-formed ideas are discarded before they can be fleshed out into something worthwhile This is incredibly unhelpful, because this is paralysing in practice, and means I struggle to come up with anything. IвЂ™m a massive perfectionist, and I find it easy to slip into the failure mode of generating the perfect idea. I think there are two main insights here: Solving the small problems I run into when doing work But IвЂ™ve found it useful in a wide range of areas in my life. This is obviously a useful skill in settings like doing art and research. This is a skill that I still suck at, but IвЂ™ve improved a lot at over time, and this post is my attempt to outline the approach thatвЂ™s worked best for me. I think creativity is an incredibly valuable skill and, importantly, a learnable skill, not an inherent trait. I think these problems are, at their heart, a lack of creativity. The space of possibilities is enormous and the ability to search beyond whatвЂ™s obviously visible is really valuable for noticing when you are wasting motion. I think this is a really big problem, because the world is large and complicated.

I find that this goes hand-in-hand with the far larger problem of being trapped within your preconceptions - to notice the obvious solution to your problem, the obvious life path ahead of you, the obvious thing somebody in your role should do, and never realising there can be anything more. To be working on a problem, or trying to generate ideas, find it hard and stop looking. A really common failure mode that I observe in myself and others is to get stuck and then give up.

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