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4 • Set a Quota for Yourself

The aim of building up idea fluency is to enable you to generate quantities of ideas against any problem you may have. So start shooting for quantity right away any time you have a problem. Give yourself an actual number quota of ideas to get down on paper before you try to evaluate or organize them. Don't set an impossible task for yourself, but if you can usually think up two or three ways something might be done, try setting a quota of at least five ways. When you can make five, up your quota to ten. When you get to ten, try fifteen or twenty. You shouldn't have to keep this up too long before you will find that quantities of ideas begin to come easier, and you will be able to produce any given number of ideas in much less time than it took you when you first started the practice. You will also notice that when an on-the-spot problem presents itself, instead of making a "blind stab" for a solution, your mind will automatically start running through many different ways of handling it.

You will also find that the quality of your ideas is improving with the quantity. This gets back to the basic advantage of idea fluency: If you have a problem, and you have only one idea how it might be solved, then good, bad, or indifferent, one idea is all you have. If it fails, then you are right back with no ideas. If you have two ideas, chances are one will be somewhat better than the other. If you have twenty or fifty or a hundred ideas, your biggest problem may then be to decide which is best.

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