Lowering Standards to Boost Creativity

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Lowering your standards and starting with bad ideas can help boost creativity and remove mental blocks. Pouring out the bad ideas allows room for the good ideas to flow. By taking action and doing something, even if the outcomes are not immediately useful, it helps loosen things up and move in the right direction. Having more ideas, even if they are initially low-quality, increases the likelihood of generating higher quality and more original ideas over time.

"To be alive is to battle stuckness." So declares NYU professor Adam Alter in his new book, "Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most." Adam has spent years studying why we get stuck — in dead-end jobs and creative cul-de-sacs — and, crucially, how to go from inertia to success.

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