15 Tips to Develop a More Innovative, Open Mind

Updated on December 15th, 2016 by Quertime Writer in Self-Improvement

We all want to achieve success in a particular sphere or even many spheres. In most cases a secret of success is doing something creative and innovative while others are doing the same things over and over again and hope to achieve new results.

Yes, you’ve got it right: an innovative mind is the key to achieving good results. Some people have inborn creative abilities. If you can’t boast of that, don’t worry: you can develop an innovative mind if you really want it. And here are some tips for you.

1. Set Goals
Your thoughts will be more productive if they have a particular direction. Imagine a target and arrows flying towards it: this target is your goal, and arrows are your thoughts and ideas.

What is more, once you have a particular goal, it’s easier to measure your success in achieving it.

2. Use Your Critical Thinking
This doesn’t mean you should avoid best practices or innovations created by other people. Creative thinking means not taking the world and things around you as they are. For example, you can follow best practices but search for flaws in them and try to improve these practices, or tools, or anything else.

Many inventions were created due to critical thinking: for example, sugar sticks that are extremely popular these days. Making people use your invention the way you want it is another question.

3. Don’t be Afraid of New Things
Fire, electricity, even chairs once were new things for people. Today we are using them in our daily life. What I mean here is that if you are using only tried ideas and methods, you will hardly achieve success. Don’t be afraid to use new ones!

4. Think Outside of the Box
This point is closely connected with the previous ones. Thinking outside of the box ensuresthat your ideas will have an innovative potential.

5. Push through Failure
We tend to think that people who managed to achieve success have always been successful. But if we study their biography closer, we‘ll see that success comes only after many failures. For example, Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb and only attempt 1,001 worked. Do you get it?

Big things don’t happen overnight, there’s a long way of failed attempts, gathered experience and self-confidence leading to success.

6. Believe in Yourself
Self-confidence is something that seems to be so easy and natural but in reality it rarely is. Many people fail to develop a creative mind just because they don’t believe in themselves. If you also suffer from lack of self-confidence, answer this question: if you don’t believe in yourself, who will believe in your ideas?

7. Seek for Solitude
We are social beings and we need other people in our lives. We need parties, friends and boyfriends or girlfriends. But the voice of the crowd is too loud, and it cansilence your own voice. That’s why it’s important to spend time alone from time to time. It will help you listen to your thoughts and generate new ideas.

8. Dream More

Allow your mind to wander. If you have many tasks and things to do, you can relax and take breaks. Unleash your thoughts during these breaks, and the chances of developing interesting and innovative ideas increase. In general, switching activities is a good practice which enhances productivity.

9. Ask Questions
You definitely have good chances for developing innovative ideas if you have a curious mind. Don’t stop asking questions about things, people, and events around you. These questions can trigger interesting ideas.

But it’s not enough just to ask questions. Do you remember Dr. Alfred Lanning from I, Robot saying “My responses are limited. You must ask the right questions.” What does it mean for you? This means you should make sure you’re asking the questions that are really important for understanding the world around you and creating innovative ideas which are able to change it for the better.

10. Learn a New Language
According to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” These words illustrate how a new language broadens your mind and image of the world. This adds up to your creativeness.

11. Travel
Learning a new language is good, but speaking it with the natives is even better. Travelling helps you discover new people, places, ways of life; it expands your creative horizons, giving many perspectives and experiences. Diversity introduces all kinds of new ideas and things.

12. Write Down Your Thoughts
While searching for inspiration in the world around, don’t forget to write down ideas coming to your mind, even those that seem unimportant and strange. You may think you’ll remember all your ideas, but the mind is tricky, it will wash away all your best ideas if you fail to note them down. Remember how it happens when you are falling asleep? Now you are inventing something really great, and the next moment you don’t remember any detail of your invention.

14. Sleep More
This is a post about critical and innovative thinking, and you may ask how sleep is connected with that. Many researches proved that there’s a strong link between sleep and our ability to take decisions, complete tasks and be active in general. Lack of sleep and insomnia cause negative issues and affect our memory.

I hope now you understand how important sleep is for innovative things.

15. Bring Ideas to Life

This is the last but not least point of this article. There should be time for thought and time for its implementation. Even best innovative ideas vanish if nobody cares about bring them to life.
Remember the first point mentioned here? Yes, it’s about setting goals. Choose one goal which is the most important for you at this moment, look though the ideas you’ve wrote down to find the best suitable for achieving your goal. Now it’s time to work on them, it will finally let you hit the desired target.

Wrapping up

Before developing a creative mind you will have to develop some habits to help you. The points of this post can be seen as these habits.

You should remember that habits are repetitive actions, the mentioned things should not be done just once upon a time, they should come naturally and become part of your daily life.

Author: Kristina Azarenko

Kristina is a devoted marketer and SEO specialist with special love to blogging. Currently she works at Amasty, a company that developing professional Magento extensions.