The first rule of having good ideas: Don't try to have good ideas.

What's important is just to have ideas. When you have an idea you don't know how good it is. It can only be judged when you have more ideas to compare it to.

Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin said “Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, ‘None'.”

When there's pressure to think of a “great” idea, you start judging your ideas before you've even written them down.

American advertising legend George Lois said that he told everyone in his department to come up with a great idea for a client. He came back in an hour and nobody had any ideas at all. So he said, “Okay, come up with twenty ideas.” He came back in an hour and everyone had twenty ideas. Some were good and some were bad, but they'd all managed to get twenty ideas.

Don't Fall in Love

What's just as bad as being too judgemental is not being judgemental enough. You have an idea and you fall head over heels in love with it and you stop thinking.

It might be a great idea, but it's probably not. It's usually the ideas that you have after sweating over the problem for a bit, which are the best. Try not to get too fixated on one idea. Just write it down and carry on thinking.

Feed the Mind

As you write down each idea, it's not just being recorded on paper; it's also being etched into your brain. And it's not just that you're memorizing that particular idea, you're also creating material for further ideas.

Einstein talked about ideas coming from “combinatory play” and Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” So the more thoughts you have about a problem, the more interesting the combination of ideas you can have.

The writer James Altucher came up with the concept of increasing your idea muscle by coming up with ten ideas a day. Each day he picks a different subject. It could be anything “Ten businesses I can start”, “Ten ways to give me more free time”, “Ten ways to make my daily commute more interesting”. The important thing is to force yourself to come up with ten. As he says, the first three will be fairly easy, but the last few can be like squeezing blood out of a stone.

I think it's a great idea and would thoroughly recommend it. Again with this exercise, it's not about the quality, it's about the quantity. But by freeing yourself from the pressure of having to have good ideas, you will find that by having lots of ideas you will naturally start having interesting ideas.

What's really important are those last few ideas. Whether they're good ideas or not, it's the effort you put in on these that will give you a more creative mind. As in the gym, it's the last set of reps that you struggle with, rather than the first set, which is most beneficial. In the words of the late, great Maya Angelou, “You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”