10 fun ways to be creative

1. Look through recipes in cookbooks

Recipes that combine known ingredients into different things is amazing. It sparks your taste buds and your brain.

2. Find a magazine that you don't normally look at

Maybe that horse magazine. Or outdoor magazine. Or the wedding magazine if you're already married.

3. Chip Kidd's Go

An amazing book about design and how anyone can steal the designs from others

4. Take a walk

Preferably not with your device.

5. Order something new at a restaurant you frequent often

Tim Ferriss likes to go to restaurants and order two things: he asks for the most popular dish, and then he asks for the dish that people don't order but that the chef thinks is best.

6. Go into the bookstore and look at books you never look at

The other day, I went into a bookstore and looked at war history books. Not my jam but lots of great stories and insights in those books.

7. Subscribe to The Sample

The Sample is a newsletter that sends you other email newsletters. I don't like all of them but I've discovered a few interesting ones.

8. Use a whack pack

I was gifted with Roger von Oech's Whack Pack. It's a set of cards that throws in different strategies and helps 'whack' you out of conventional thinking. You don't have to buy the pack - you can just create a set of flash cards and then write down a different strategy for each.

Another great set of strategies is Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.

9. Go to the app store and look at the editor's choice of apps

Find something that interests you and take a look. Sometimes you'll discover a new app that will spark new ideas.

10. Open a book to a random page

That day, read a random chapter. Then, whatever you read, implement it somehow throughout the day.

Wyip