Quick Tips for Generating Ideas: What Is the Opposite?

What is the opposite?

To help you generate more ideas, think of the question you’re asking or the problem you’re trying to solve and ask yourself, what is the opposite?

For example, if I’m trying to come up with a name for a new puppy, my original question might be, how do I come up with a unique name for my new puppy? And that can feel overwhelming. How do I make sure this is a great name?

A potential opposite would be asking how do I come up with the most common name for my new puppy? This feels like a much easier question to answer. Don’t filter your thoughts; allow ideas to flow as you brainstorm ideas. The first thing that came to mind as a common name is Bob.
Now I can generate dog names I’ve heard a lot before. Sometimes, starting to write can help us develop more ideas.

As you work through writing down the opposite, while you might not have a solution right away, you now have a list of names that you don’t want to use. Next, seeing a list of names that I don’t like can help spark ideas or alternatives to lead to what I want. Once I have this list of opposites, I could also use that list and apply a different idea generation activity. I might switch and pretend that I’m someone else or move it through an idea generation chart.

I could take the list and see if I can combine letters from those names or combine those names to make a more exciting name. Are there ways I can do word association with each of those names and see if that takes me somewhere interesting? Sometimes you’re going to have to do more than one of these exercises, but a big part of all of these exercises is they help you get started. And sometimes that’s one of the biggest hurdles to generating ideas is going from absolutely zero ideas to some ideas that we are making progress and getting our minds warmed up and started.