Harness Random Inputs

One of the best ways to stimulate your creativity, to come up with really fresh, original ideas, is to use the random, to use a random input, to harness the power of chance in your life. And many artists, musicians, composers, poets found this, that something random that has happened to them has stimulated them to some great discovery or innovative idea. One example, a famous example of this, is Sir Alexander Fleming, the Scottish microbiologist and researcher who went on holiday. When he came back, he found that one of his Petri dishes had developed a mold, and rather than just clean it, he became curious. He investigated, and he found that the mold was resistant to bacteria, and he had stumbled on penicillin. Penicillin, which saved countless lives, was an accidental discovery. And my advice is this: when something unexpected happens, don't get annoyed with it.

Get curious.

Why did that happen? What can we— how can we use this in some new way? And very often the random will be helpful. But you might say, Paul, how can you make this happen? You can't go out and expect something new and wonderful to happen every day. You're waiting for chance to happen. And that's true. But you can Deliberately introduce the random into your life and into your workshops and into your meetings and into your thought processes. And the random inputs which I would recommend that you consider are these: a random word from the dictionary, a random object. So sometimes on my workshops, if we've got a challenge to face, I'll ask everyone to bring in an object. And before they know what the challenge is, they don't know how they're going to use the object, anything from their desk or their home. It might be a picture, it might be a paperclip, it might be a pen, it might be a bottle, it might be a can of drink or something else. They bring it and then when they're there I say, you've got to explain now how that object is the key to solving this problem. What properties of the object, attributes of the object, or uses of the object could we harness in some way? And it leads all over the place and sometimes it leads to very good ideas. You can use a random song or poem. You take a poem at random and you see what ideas in there you can incorporate into your story or your campaign or whatever else you need an idea for. A movie, a movie at random has all sorts of crazy things in it which can stimulate you, and a picture works really well for some groups. So I have a group of random pictures that I use. You could say, Paul, they're not random because you chose them, and you'd be right, of course, but they are very different, all sorts of weird and strange objects, and some people Some people work better with pictures than with words. Some people find that the graphic image stimulates the brain better than the written word. So, how does it work? Well, with the word, what you do is you find a noun at random, and you simply pick up a dictionary. Here's a dictionary. It doesn't have to be a big dictionary, a small dictionary works fine. And you go through it, and you take the first noun that you come to. Nouns work better than verbs or adjectives, I find, though you could try those if you wanted. But you take a noun and off you go with it, and then you list some attributes of that noun, some associations, and they don't all have to be literal. Some of them can be quite lateral, strange associations with the word. Then you think about your objective, whatever the challenge is, and you try to force an association between the word or any of its attributes or associations and the challenge, and you generate new ideas. And you'll get all sorts of weird, strange ideas, and occasionally you'll get a really, really creative idea, much more creative than if you just sit down and do a normal brainstorm. Why does it work? Because it displaces the brain into a different place. The brain starts in a different place to solve the problem, and the brain is very good at finding connections, and it finds connections between the word or its attributes and the objective. So, let's try an example. Let's say we're a geography teacher at a school, we want to come up with a project for the class this term. We open the dictionary and the first word we get is pack. Now, pack has many different meanings, it's a good kind of word for this. So, we list out some meanings of the word pack and we say a pack animal, like a mule, a backpack or a backpacker, Pakistan, you can have a packed lunch, You know, a pack of cards, a pack of animals, a package deal for a holiday, maybe a Pac-Man game.

And then you go through each of these and you say, what ideas does that stimulate for a geography project?

Well, we could look at the life cycle of a mule and where it goes and what it eats and what kinds of landscape it exists in. We could go on a backpack. We could take people with us and put on our backpacks and go on a walk and a ramble in the local woods or the hills. We could do a project on Pakistan. We've got some pupils in the school whose parents came from Pakistan.

We could involve them.

We could look at the geography of Pakistan. We could have a geography lunch where everybody comes in and talks about their favourite country, their favourite place to visit, their favourite geographical feature.

We have a pack of cards with geographical things written on them like a volcano or a an oxbow lake or, you know, a fjord or an iceberg or something, so we could have different images on the packs and use those to discuss geography. And so it goes on.

Pac-Man, you'd have some kind of video game that you created. So each of these gives you a different set of ideas, some of which are worthless, some of which are impractical, but occasionally you get something which is really quite creative and will lead somewhere interesting.

So I said there's all these different random inputs, and you can do these sitting at your desk, but you can also use the internet to find random inputs, and I'd like to try and show that to you now if we can. So let's just put this away, let's load this up, and here's something I loaded earlier, a random word generator. I searched for random word generator and this came up. It's actually called randomwordgenerator.com. And if you key in, you say I want 10 words all beginning with the first letter K, and then generate random words, and here they are: kneel, knit, king, kinship, kick, kit, knock, kid. These are all interesting, these would all work quite well, trust me, in a brainstorm or an idea generating session. They're all different starting points, and if you go down here, you can say a random word, a random noun, which I prefer, random verb, a name, an adjective, a random sentence, a random— all of these random inputs, random letter seek, random act of kindness, all of these, a random fact would be very interesting. These are all stimulating places to start. So this is a good site for you to use to stimulate creativity. Wikipedia is a great source.

Everyone uses Wikipedia.

I use it, I research using it, and on Wikipedia on the left-hand side there is a little tab which says Random Article. And I don't know where this is going to take us. If we click on this, it takes us to a random article which is called The Car Wash Film, an American film in 1976, and tells you all about it. And that might give you an idea for your story or your marketing campaign or whatever else. If you don't like it, you click on Random Article again and you get something else. The Lille University of Science and Technology tells you about it in France and All sorts of things there.

So Wikipedia random article will give you random stimulation, and you come across some really interesting things on here, and there are literally millions of articles on Wikipedia, so you're going to find something new.

When it comes to pictures, I clicked on random pictures and I came up with this site, Unsplash, it's called. Sorry, Unsplash. And it just gives random pictures. And there are all sorts of strange things. An airplane surrounded by trees, a blue lemon sliced in 2 halves, a sparkler coming out of a body of water, a sofa on a beach, all these people crossing a gray and white pedestrian lane, and so on. All these knives. And so all of these things could particularly stimulate you, could potentially give you some great new ideas. So that's good. If you want something more focused, then I would go to a site like Pixabay. You can do it on Google, but I actually find the picture sites better. So Pixabay has thousands, over a million images, and say we are trying to promote our home improvement store, we might key in the words home improvement and then search. and see what comes up. And here we are. So that's an interesting image, various things here. So let's go down here. And here we have a bunch of nails, we've got a guy painting his home, we've got all sorts of things happening. And it might give us ideas for how we could promote this. Using different techniques, different stimuli. So all of these are different ways of improvement. And here are the tiles, hammers, stairs, the building itself, a man. This is an interesting picture, shows a little device to hammer in a nail safely, use a little piece of cardboard, and you could emphasise safety features of your facility, or the tools and techniques you can use to make things easier. So there's all sorts of ways you can use the images here. This is much more focused than the pure random images that we saw over here, but it will give you ideas relating to a subject. So you typically key in the words, and if you don't like these, you key in some different words. So instead of home improvement, you might say house, and you might say painting, or you might say hammer. and see what other things come up, and you'll get a different set of ideas, each stimulating you. So that is my recommendation, that you use the internet, you use random words, you use random pictures, and you force an association. It's not the first thing that you see, it's where it leads that's interesting, and I think you'll find that it gives you lots of creative, radical, fresh ideas.