Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas

Great article by Jason Cohen:

How do you come up with fresh, transformative ideas?

“Brainstorming” is hard—staring at a blank whiteboard, wondering whether someone could make a real-life “dark mode” whiteboard, then realizing that’s what a blackboard is, only dustier.

The following prompts jostle you out of tiny thinking. Each stretches some dimension of reality to an extreme. So extreme that it is nearly nonsense. But dramatically different perspectives can reveal distinctly new ideas. An idea that would be a 60% solution in an extreme hypothetical case, could be a 2x or even a 10x idea in reality.

This reminds me a lot of the book “How to live” by Derek Sivers and taking extreme positions or ideas and seeing how they could or couldn’t fit your life and business. As he says in his book, “Creativity comes from shaking things up.”