Transcripts
1. Introduction: You have a creative
project coming up. Unfortunately, you
ran out of ideas. This could be for writing
an upcoming book. It could be that
you've got your team organized and you need to generate more ideas in order for your company to stick
out in the marketplace. Maybe you want to launch
a new Skillshare class, but you just don't
know how to get the ideas from your
mind into reality. Luckily, that's what
this class is. For. This class, you're going to
understand brainstorming 101. We're going to learn the
art of creative thinking. Few strategies on how
you can effectively brainstorm in order to
generate staggering ideas. In the end, you're going to
be given a final project that will allow you to test
your brainstorming skills. My name is Armand Audrey, the founder of Armani talks, a media company which
helps engineers and entrepreneurs improve their
communication skills. And one of the staples of communication skills
is creativity. And in this class, you will level up
your creativity. I look forward to
seeing you inside.
2. What is Brainstorming?: Brainstorming is the
ability to generate ideas. The question is, what
exactly is an idea? If someone asks you for your
name and you say your name, are you giving this
person an idea? You can make the case. Yeah, technically am. But that's not how we use it in terms of human expression. Whenever we're talking about
giving someone an idea, we're thinking about
giving them something extraordinary or something
that they were not expecting, which will help them
solve some sort of issue. If I just go up to this
person and I'm like, Hey, do you know that monkeys
can jump this high? This person is going to
be like, okay, I mean, this is pretty on ordinary, not helping my life in any way. So in this scenario, we did not give this person a useful idea for us
to generate ideas. We have to understand
how the mind works. We don't have to understand
it in too much detail, but we just need
to understand that the mind is a thought
generating machine. It's been estimated
that the mind generates roughly 30 thousand
plus thoughts a day. We're not aware of
every single thought. The ones that were becoming
aware of are the ones that have some sort of
feeling associated with it. Now just the thoughts
by itself doesn't mean much, it's just content. Our goal during the
brainstorming session is to pick the relevant thoughts and connected in a way in
order to produce an idea. But we gotta be giving someone value that
someone can often be us. One of the best ways
to get started with brainstorming is trying to
solve our own problems. And exercise are creative
muscles along the way. But just know that brainstorming is all about generating ideas. Ideas, our thoughts
structured in a unique way in order to
provide useful value.
3. Brainstorming Environment: The most important things
for brainstorming is to set a judgment free zone. If a brainstorming
by herself and you keep overthinking
in your life. Know, all these ideas suck. These are going to provide
useful value to anyone. Then you're reducing
your decision tree. A decision tree is the amount
of options available to the mind in order to
make creative decisions. Every single time
that you are judging yourself during the
brainstorming session, your decision tree is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, which is making
it more difficult to do creative thinking. If you are a leader who has
different workers coming in in order to brainstorm
a solution together. You got to set the right tone. You can be one of those
people that are saying, All right, come on Susie. Or last six ideas were idiotic. Be more like Matt.
Don't do that. And if you see your coworkers or your employees arguing
with one another, shooting each
other's ideas down. Then you've got to set the
tone by encouraging openness. How you encourage
openness is going to depend upon you and
your situation. A few recommendations that
I have is to smile more. Another thing is
to embrace comedy. Another thing is to have a reward for yourself after
the brainstorming session. But the ultimate measure
of success is to just say that during brainstorming, there is no such thing as a
good idea and a bad idea. You could be
hypothetically having ten atrocious ideas suddenly is going to lead you to your
11th idea being brilliant. That 11th idea didn't just
appear out of the woodwork. The ten before it
led up to this gym. During brainstorming,
all ideas are good ideas and just keep
cultivating that tone.
4. Finding your Formula: Different people are going to require different strategies. For the next couple of slides, I'm going to give
you a few optional strategies that you can use. Try it out and see which one works best for your personality. And if multiple of the options
work for your personality, then go ahead and leverage
whatever you need to leverage.
5. Mumbling: Mumbling is awful
for social skills. Mumbling is amazing
for content creation, more specifically,
with brainstorming. The reason why that mumbling
is great for brainstorming is because you're
not committing. When you're not committing, you're sort of like that monkey that's jumping from
branch to branch, from tree to tree,
feeling limitless. You're not just being the monkey that's like this tree is mine. Instead, you're exploring
the entire forest. This is great because
with mumbling, you're not committing and it
allows for more flexibility. Let me give you an example. Let's say someone comes
to me and it's like, Hey, I want you to explain to me why old-school wallets are better than these new clips
that kids are using. Rather than immediately making a logical case for why the wallets are better
than the clips. I'm going to pause. I'm going to mumble the
most important points. So at this stage, I don't necessarily know
the most important points. So this is how the modeling
process is gonna go. It's gonna be like, well, wallets are more traditional than the new clips.
It's dirtier. Host coins, it's traditional, which allows it to hold coins. It's old-school,
represents a mindset, fearful, safe with it. To you. What I'm doing right now probably doesn't
make much sense. But to me, it makes all
the sense in the world. And the more debt
I'm hopping from idea to idea, not
necessarily committing. I'm starting to get a
general feel for the talk. From that general Phil. I could be like, okay, from the ten different
ideas that I have, these three make the
most logical sense. Now I'm going to choose
these three during mumbling. It's phenomenal because
you're not committing, which allows you to
expand your ideas, expand your creative thinking. And then once you have expanded, you've got the view of
the bigger picture. That is when you can sewn in.
6. Whiteboards & Journals: If you know any
successful people, they're all going to
tell you that they have a whiteboard or a journal. You could use the whiteboard or the journal in order
to brainstorm. This is pretty much similar
to the mumbling one. But for this one, you're actually writing
something down. You could get the
whiteboard and a marker, or you could just get a
journal and a pencil. You give yourself a
certain Talk idea. Then from there, you just start spitting out as many ideas that are coming to you to
make it easier for yourself. You could set a timer. Don't you love the timer? Something about the timer adds discipline to a creative field. Something about the
timer builds urgency. You don't only have to
use the timer by itself. You can use the timer plus another narrative which
raises the stakes even more. Let's say someone comes
to you and is like, explain why the game of basketball is better than
any other sport out there. You have two minutes. And if you don't finish
it in two minutes, in terms of generating
your ideas, at least, then you'll die. How much you believe this
high pressure narrative? Well, influence your creativity. It will influence
you in terms of generating the ideas fast and not judging
yourself too much. Because if you
really think you're going to die after
the two minutes, no idea is a bad idea. You're just sharing
all these ideas. And you're sort of
like a machine gun. Be like the machine gun
during brainstorming, rather than having a
bow and arrow approach. Machine gun generates a
whole bunch of ideas. And you could do that with
a whiteboard and a marker, or a journal and a pencil.
7. Conversations: You ever heard the quote,
small minds talk about people. Average minds talk about events. Great minds talk about ideas. Become great. Because when you're
speaking about ideas with other people, which are technically doing, is you're brainstorming
out loud. Do you know a few
great people then get in the habit of picking up
the phone, calling them, meeting up with them in person, and talk about strategies, concepts, ideas on something that you are building
or working on. It could be a business, it could be a project
in your corporate job. It could be some sort of
issue that you're facing in your life and see the type of ideas that they're
firing at you. And then you add
more onto that idea. This is brainstorming out loud. But let's say you're at that
stage in your life right now or you're like, Look, bro. Unfortunately, most
of my friends are either talking about
people or events. What do I do then? You could do a lot of things. There's this beautiful
thing called the Internet. Within the Internet,
there's Twitter, there's YouTube, there's
different communities, forums, etc, where
you could immerse yourself in and
speak about ideas. From there. People
that you meet, you can take them
to another domain, maybe Skype, maybe Zoom and have a conversation
with them there. And this is when you are
speaking more about ideas. The beauty about
this approach is that oftentimes when you're speaking about ideas
with another person, they may tackle the issue from a completely different angle that you are not even aware of. The more perspective
that you get, the more debt you flex
your brainstorming skills. This is one of those creative acts that doesn't always have
to be done solo. You can do it with other people.
8. Bonus: Noticing Things: Submitted this far, I want
to give you a bonus game, which is going to help
you out tremendously, which will creative
thinking skills and your brainstorming skills. I call this game the
art of noticing things. You're gonna find
one household item. You're going to notice
40 things about it. As you're noticing.
It could be in the statement form or
in the question forum. To give you an
example, this mouse, it actually looks like a
physical mouse, the animal. This is me noticing something
and statement form. I wonder how the inventor of the mouse thought
of the name the mouse. This is me noticing something in a question form by constantly stacking up more and more
things that we're noticing. We are expanding our mind
into a new mode of thinking. Every now and then. Once you've noticed,
let's say 15 things, you're gonna be like, Look, I can't notice any more
things about this object. But that is when you
need to challenge yourself to keep pushing further
and further and further. Do not stop until
you hit the 40 mark. And you'll surprise yourself. You'll notice yourself noticing our whole bunch of things. From there. It's gonna become much easier to brainstorm and think creatively.
9. Final Project: Now's the time for
the final project. I want you to brainstorm
on the following prompt. There is a hippo wants
to become a dog. That's it. That's the prompt. Making it general because if
I'm making it too specific, then it may restrain
your creativity. A hippo wants to become a dog. Your goal is to
generate ten ideas through the brainstorming
method of mumbling, whiteboard or journaling,
or through conversations. Ten ideas. Once you have your ten ideas, I want you to post it in the final project
section right on below. I look forward to seeing it. I appreciate you for joining this brainstorming
for beginners class. If you learn a thing
or two and you want to hear more from the
Armani talks brand. Be sure to check out
our money talks.com. This website, you're
going to learn more about the harmonic talks
philosophy through plugs, videos, podcasts, books,
and much more are monotonic.com and I look
forward to hearing from you.
Arman Chowdhury, Confidence thru Communication
