Where do ideas come from?

And why don’t I have any?

Here is where this very post came from:

I was surfing on Tumblr, hoping that inspiration would strike. Then Twitter. Then I got very desperate, and checked Facebook. I have learned multiple times that the best ideas come the furthest I am from my computer at all, but unfortunately I keep looking for ideas sitting in front of my computer anyway. For a place full of every idea everyone else has ever had, the Internet is terrible for helping me come up with new ones.

Luckily, I have a few tricks for getting this done. The easiest? Get as far from a screen as possible.

After the ideas start flowing, you have to somehow catalog them. An idea lost and forgotten isn’t worth much, after all. I once heard Dave Kellett say that you should write ideas down, because they make room in your head for new ones. This is why I have a scrap of paper that says “How cute is this dog? (CHART!)”.

Then, it comes to implementation. Just when it seems as though things will never come together, at the last minute they always find a way.

If nothing else, there’s always the next one. As this chart shows:

something is always better than nothing.