d.school Fellow Ise Lyfe says, “It doesn’t matter if you’re good enough. You most certainly aren’t, at any new task… the question is: are you great enough to rise to a new challenge?”

Shockingly, one of the greatest determinants of the overall quality of your ideas is your expectation of when good ideas will come. If you want to improve your creative output, then expect good ideas to keep coming!

“This can’t be all I’m supposed to be doing.” Ashanti Branch, the talent behind the #millionmasksmovement, shares how he made the slow-but-profound transition from high school math teacher to movement-maker. His experience is surprisingly common.

Maya Angelou said, “I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.” I agree. But I’d like to make the case for tidying up every now and then. This is a spin on “clean up,” but it’s deeper than that.

It’s tempting to think that the best place to start is smack dab in the middle of the bell curve. But that’s not the case. The history of innovation teaches that the best breakthroughs (even for the middle of the curve) come from the extremes.

What is your regular creative training regimen? David Kelley once told me, “I think people fail to realize that the first-order goal is to be getting in practice. The first step is training your mind to think differently.”

It’s not as complicated as it seems. The only thing we have to give up is a sense of efficiency. As is the case with so many tactics for breakthrough thinking, we have to be willing to indulge irresponsibility to think beyond the box.

This guest post comes from Gavin Guidry, Creative Director at R/GA. Gavin writes, “Rather than viewing each brief as the impetus for creation, let’s look at the future that we want to see, and ask how our work can bring us closer.”

Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century. You might be surprised to see the two routine habits that produced such breakthrough thinking.

Subconscious processing has tremendous potential to deliver breakthrough thinking. But you can only tap into that potential if you actually care about a problem. Design thinking and empathy are a great way to foster that critical precursor to innovation.

It’s understandable that inputs fuel output. What’s much more surprising is that output-discipline actually reinforces the inputs we seek. When we use information, it cements it into our long term memory.

Founders have a sense for what the market wants, but have to be willing to adapt based on real-time feedback, and iterate accordingly. But sometimes, it’s hard to hear the market…

Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson says that framing a meeting — like the d.schools, “Flaring or focusing?” meeting-opener — helps teams do the work they need to do, in the way they need to do it.

This guest post comes from Richard Wilding, Founder of WMW. Richard observes the default tendency is to lead through cowardice, and imagines a world in which we meet challenges head on, rather than hiding.

The fundamental responsibility of the innovator is to make connections. But how does one do that? Here are a few starting suggestions.

Most folks are the victims OF a breakthrough more often than they are the perpetrators. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can tempt lightning… Or at least, we can increase the odds of a strike.

If you want to avoid resistance, don’t suggest doing anything new. Almost every attempt to introduce innovation is met with resistance. By examining the surprising sources of resistance, we can learn how to frame innovation in a way that wins minds.

Organizations inadvertently insulate us from the things that bother our customers. When we immerse ourselves in our own products and processes, we viscerally experience what needs to be reinvented.

Music executive Jonathan Azu uses a simple formula to remain inspired: every two weeks, he meets with a leader he admires.

Marcus Hollinger is a modern day renaissance man. While he’s got a steady gig as CMO of Reach Records, he also just started an incredible coffee company on the side. Far from sapping him of creative energy, the side-hustle fuels fresh thinking.