Creativity Rule #3: Keep Yourself in Suspense

Creativity is all about generating new ideas. But your brain wants to find patterns in your usual activities, so if it finds something that works, it sticks with it. To get away from this normal way of thinking you need to suspend judgment when you are coming up with creative ideas. No idea is stupid or crazy for the time you are being creative. Later on you can go through all the ideas you've come up with and weed out the ones that don't work. But while your in the process of coming up with something new you need to come up with as many ideas as possible.

The reason this works is that each idea you think is dumb or doesn't work may be the link you need to a new idea that will. Sometimes there needs to be a bridge between your old, boring ideas and the ones that are off the wall. If you suspend judgment and just come up with as many ideas as possible, you'll be successful.