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 I had an email exchange with my close friend and business partner earlier this week.

“I get ideas but think they are probably stupid.  Okay,  I have some ideas. Again, I get scare you’ll think I’m reaaaally dumb.”

My response?

“No ideas are stupid.  You start filtering **** like that, we’ll never find the ******* gold.

 Brainstorming has no filter.  You never know where a “stupid” idea might lead or what associations it might trigger.”

When you are trying to generate new ideas, applying a filter like “That sounds stupid” won’t get you anywhere.  It’s idea suicide.

Could a discussion on the possibilities of becoming a lawn gnome distributor lead to becoming a successful manufacturer of combat gnomes?

Brainstorming involves turning off your stupid filters and running with it.   Keep a recorder or a notebook handy and keep track of everything.   Go off on tangents and see where they lead.  Maybe they’ll lead to the gold.

The one thing you can’t do while brainstorming is criticize.   If you start shooting down ideas, you are destroying the opportunity to find greatness.  Even if an idea is  impractical, build on it.  There has to be an angle that becomes worthy of consideration.    On the off-chance that there’s not, run with it anyway.  It’s an exercise in creativity.

I regularly send my friend emails with potential business ideas.  Most of them come to nothing, but once in a while, something clicks and we launch a successful venture together.   If I were filtering ideas because they might be stupid, we might not have some of the projects we’ve got.

In addition to random & odd emails, I’ve got a notebook of some kind with me everywhere I go to record any passing idea I may have.   In my car, I use a voice recorder.   I periodically review everything I’ve noted and copy most of it into evernote.

Someday, those pieces may come together into a billion dollar idea.

How do you generate ideas?  Do you bounce ideas off of friends or get drunk and shuffle a Trivial Pursuit deck into a Monopoly game?