3 unusual ways to create *new* ideas for your writing

The world's best selling drug

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“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin

Ideas are the lifeblood of great creativity. It’s the idea, the seed of something brilliant that sets you apart. If you’ve ever tried to write on the side, you’ll know that coming up with a great idea is hard work. It’s easy to default to old, worn ideas that are tried and tested.

You want to create something different, unique, something that feels honest and you, but you end up defaulting to well-established ‘safe’ ideas because you know they resonate.

Things like:

• Success is a mindset

• The journey is more important than the destination

• You are the average of the people you spend time with

All true, but all well-established ideas that were (once) *awe-inspiring*, but they no longer evolve the collective thinking. And if it’s one job you have as a writer, I think, it’s to evolve the current thinking of the world.

To adapt, to respond to change, and produce something that creates an evolution.

Here are 3 unique ways to come up with adaptive ideas that will help you go beyond the obvious into *evolving the thinking*.

1. *Rational* design

James Black designed the first Beta-blocker, Propranolol, which later became the world's best-selling drug.

In the 1940s, two things happened — Ulf S von Euler discovered that noradrenaline was a natural component of the body, and secondly, there were, in fact, two different types of receptors in the heart, which were defined by their responses to different catecholamines (Raymond Ahlquist).

Critically, the beta-receptors’ response to isoprenaline, adrenaline, and noradrenaline was linked to heart (and smooth muscle) contraction*.

Now this all might seem a little off topic, what’s this got to do with innovation, you might ask? Well, at the time, James Black was interested in the heart and specifically a medical condition called Angina. His dad at the time suffered from the condition and the only treatment at the time was nitroglycerine, which *increased* the flow of blood to the heart.

Black thought that maybe, if the heart was beating slower, and demanded less energy, the effects of Agina would be reduced. Hence, he went about finding a drug that would block these beta-receptors and reduce the impact of adrenaline.

AKA he had a hypothesis of how to solve his problem and went about finding a solution that would do just — pioneering a new way of producing drugs, from the problem. Back then, what happened was scientists made drugs, then found a use for them.

This rational design was very different. And you can use it in your idea generation.

Here’s the breakdown and how it applies to writing: