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.

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and John Steinbeck might be wildly different characters, yet when it comes to sparking creativity, they both employ an unexpected hack.

World-class creators like Jon Acuff literally count their ideas. It’s one of the simplest ways to measure your creative capacity, and whether it’s growing.

Leaders at Stanford and Pixar have proven that one of the most powerful ways to accelerate the quality of our ideas is to actively seek and embrace critique.

Wildly inventive individuals have a habit of gathering conceptual pieces before they know exactly what they’re going to do with them. The more legos you collect, the more ideas you can make.

I was blown away by Malcolm Gladwell’s response to the question, “If you were given a month to come up with an idea for a new story, what would you do?”

Our instinct is to retreat inwardly when tasked with the challenge of coming up with ideas. Instead, we should get out. Here’s my favorite way to find ideas.

When Bob Sutton told our class, “There is no such thing as a new idea…” I thought he was wrong. Turns out, I was.

For breakthroughs to happen, we need fresh inputs to drive new connections. These connections aren’t just the function of new input, though; we’ve got to create space to realize new connections.

A recurring theme on the road to creative mastery is how we (wrongly) perceive those who are successful as having never struggled. The truth is, they did. But they persisted, nonetheless.

Author, teacher, and artist Gary Zamchick writes, “In a time of rapid disruption, it’s more important than ever to live in the liquid space between building and dreaming — a place where conceptual, innovative, and transformational leaps drive innovation and change.”

Whenever a student asked legendary Stanford Professor Bob McKim for feedback on a new design concept, he consistently gave the same response: “Show me three.” Those three words contain a remarkable depth of wisdom.

One of the simplest ways to measure your creative capacity is to count how many solutions you can imagine for any given problem. World-class creators actually, literally, count their ideas.