Your Next Big Idea: Improve Your Creativity and Problem-Solving

“Your Next Big Idea by Samuel Sanders is an engaging, easy to understand guide to increasing your creativity and idea output by teaching innovative thinking. There are six sections, covering the full idea creation process. Section One provides the seeds, helping you learn to identify problems, needs, and wants. The next section helps you uncover stigmas, and teaches you how to overcome them. The third part gets you going with brainstorming, mind-mapping, and other solution-generating tactics. Section Four introduces how to check the viability and feasibility of solutions/ideas in both the personal and business arenas. Five shows the benefits of sharing and the final section puts it all together and teaches brain hacks.

This book was great at showing how to really think outside of the box and ramp up creativity. Many of the exercises within were new to me, and did, indeed, prompt greater creativity. One exercise to teach working within limitation has you thinking up ideas by pairing two disparate items, like a train and cats. (I would so ride a cat train, like a mobile cat cafe! Some of my other ideas using that pairing include cat-themed paintings and decor, painting the train itself with cats, and a kid’s toy series of cat trains, where they look like Thomas the Tank Engine trains, but with cat faces and tails.) One thing’s for sure, and it is stressed over and over throughout the book-practice makes perfect. You are teaching your brain to think in different ways after all!

I tried the exercises, in order, as I read through the book. I’m still keeping up with the earlier exercises, working through them with more thorough attention. It was very difficult at first. It’s hard to pull the mind out of entrenched and shuttered thinking. You begin to learn things about your thinking that you may not have realized before. Hidden biases and blocks you took in young. Some of mine were rather eye-opening. I learned that I tend to avoid things that do not make sense to me and things that seem too crazy. I get stuck on the practical and the pragmatic and ignore the ‘fun’, ‘outrageous’ options. I’m starting to learn to be playful with it. The stigma work has been the most helpful to me so far, as have the brain hacks mentioned in the final section. If I still taught, this book would definitely be integrated into classwork! The younger you start teaching it, the more creative and open-minded the students would grow up to be. They wouldn’t grow out of the child’s mind that is naturally innovative.

Highly recommended for creatives, and those who want to cultivate creativity, alike! “