To become a professional in any field takes an enormous amount of skill, and hard work. Routine practice is a hallmark of the “professional” in any context. Here’s how to take a professional mentality into the innovation arena.

Two words most commonly associated with ideas are “good,” and “new.” I’ve often encouraged folks to forget “good.” Here’s the case for forgetting, “new,” too.

From Steve Jobs to Taylor Swift to Seth Godin, there’s remarkable consistency among “the greats”: having bad ideas is a necessary precondition to having good ones.

To stimulate innovation, ideas and experiments are critical. But how to free up resources necessary to drive new initiatives forward? Start by pruning back some work that’s past its prime. Here’s how.

Ed Catmull reveals the great secret behind Pixar’s success: they try before they’re perfect. “All our movies suck to begin with. Our job is to take them from suck to not suck.”

Inside every single human being lies the potential to discover hence-unknown possibilities, to have an epiphany. My mission in life is to teach others the tools that turn that seemingly-magical moment into a methodical, repeatable reality.

Dr Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist obsessed with improvisational jazz, conducted a fascinating study on creative flow. It has profound implications for what we practice, and what we value, in our individual lives and organizations.

Self-care is all the rage, and rightly so. We cannot do our best work without attention to the instrument of self. But for all our emphasis, we’ve missed a vital component of wellness.

Steve Jobs said, “Theres a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.”

Many individual innovators, and the vast majority of organizations, expend far too many resources answering the illusive question, “Can it even be done?” Instead, they should invest a fraction of the effort to answer a simpler, more important question first.

One of the greatest compliments you can pay a collaborator at the d.school is to say they’re “sparkable.” What exactly does that mean? They’ve learned to have a particular effect on creative combustion.

The need to “think outside the box” seems obvious. A few Nobel Prize winners share their thoughts on how to do it. (It’s not nearly as complicated as you might think.)

John Cleese argues convincingly that, while we can’t guarantee that creativity will yield to our invitations, yet blocking time and space for it to emerge is essential.

Jon Beekman, Founder and CEO of ManCrates, shares an enlightened tactic for helping innovators find breakthroughs they aren’t even looking for.

What can leaders do to promote creativity and innovation in their organizations? According to bestselling author and innovation guru Tom Kelley, when they’re shown new ideas, they should squint.

Paraphrasing Google X CEO Astro Teller, sparking group innovation can be as simple asking a team to “Gimme five.” Those two words contain a remarkable depth of wisdom.

There’s a critical flaw with our default approach problem solving: we tend to look for things to add, even when subtraction yields better solutions.

This guest post comes from Ozan Varol, one of my favorite rocket scientists. It’s excerpted from his new book, “Awaken Your Genius,” which is sure to be on my year-end best books list!

Don’t just generate new ideas. Iterate your old ones, too. According to legendary creators James Clear and Mr. Beast, iteration is sometimes even more important than a new idea.

One of the great secrets to effective creativity is, when you're finding creative output hard to come by, shift your attention to your inputs. The outputs of our thinking are largely a function of the inputs we seek.