Know what your ideas are made of.

Understanding how we put them together can help make them better, too.

Ideas are so familiar to us that we don’t often stop to think of what they actually are. Or, more importantly, what they’re made of. We tend to think of them as wholly original creations, birthed somewhere in the depths of our minds in a burst of unbridled genius.

Nice.

But an idea isn’t the act of making something from nothing. An idea is simply what happens when our brains put two or more existing things into a new relationship.

These associations can be incredibly powerful because they reflect the way our minds work—we don’t store information, so much as map it. We collect thoughts through association, by connecting them to things we’ve already experienced. When those connections feel fresh, novel, and exciting? That’s when we can’t stop thinking about them.

This is why we’re so attracted to powerful ideas. Not because they are new. But because they put what we already know into a surprising new context.

And this is where your subconscious comes into play.

It’s the part of your brain that’s left free to look for these powerful connections, without being worried about whether those connections make sense.

Think of it like a toddler with a bunch of oversized Lego blocks. Where each block is an image you might have stared at, or scent you’ve inhaled, or a thought you’ve come across, or a feeling that’s nagging at you, or anything else you might have encountered in any given day.

Any time your mind gets to wander, your subconscious starts picking up these bricks, and tries jamming them together, just to see what happens.

When one of these combinations happens to be kind of interesting, it builds a connection between those two previously unrelated thoughts, and — bam — you have an idea.

When the connection feels like something you’ve never seen before, but makes a new kind of meaning from those existing pieces?

That’s when it feels electric.

But here’s the thing — you’re busy gathering more bricks, every day, whether you like it or not. And the bricks you collect have a direct impact on the ideas you make. Spend your time absorbing the same thoughts, the same media, the same patterns, the same kinds of inspiration, over and over, and you’ll end up with the same bricks. And your ideas will feel like an echo of everything you’ve already seen.

But if you give yourself a richer selection to play with? Then your ideas will be richer, too.

Different bricks build different ideas.

This is why finding inspiration isn’t a nice to have for anyone who practices any form of creativity. It’s not something idle that’s done for recreation.

It’s the raw material that your ideas are made of.

So if your thoughts start to feel a bit familiar, find some new bricks to play with. Look outside your domain, your peers, your industry. Find inspiration in places you never thought to look.

Change your bricks. Change their color, their size, their shape.

And you’ll soon find you’re building ideas that look nothing like what you used to make.