9 Ways to Avoid Hitting a Creative Drought

5 min readOct 30, 2018

What every entrepreneur dreads: hitting a creative drought. When you feel something is missing somewhere and you don’t quite know what else to do without looking like a copycat.

Just like the ebb and flow of the tide. And how the sun rises each morning and sets in the evening.

Isaac Newton once said, what goes up must come down.

Each time when we create or produce work, we are tapping into our tank of ideas and using them up. That’s output.

Most of us neglect to refill our think tanks and one fine day, the ideas just stop coming.

Every entrepreneur’s nightmare

That’s when you hit the creativity drought. It’s every entrepreneur’s nightmare. When your brain stops generating good ideas. And you keep scouring around the internet, looking for inspiration but your mind can’t seem to generate any creative ideas.

Everything coming from your brain seems to be not original nor good enough. It can be an extremely frustrating experience and it takes a good while to return to the creativity flow.

I have been through creative droughts phases before and I’ll be very open with you. It’s a terrible place to be in. You spend a lot of time thinking and looking at external inspiration but somehow the ideas don’t seem to be coming together.

And you wait and wait while the time ticks. It seems to be out of your control.

This happened again and again. Till I realized the critical importance of always refilling the think tank.

You can’t wait till the tank is empty before refilling it again. That’s too late and it will take a while before the creative juices flow again.

To ensure you avoid this man-made disaster, I share my 9 different ways to constantly add inputs to your brain and enable it to consistently generate great ideas.

#1 Meet at least one new person every week.

Someone you’ve never seen or talked to before. It’s crucial to expand your network. When you hang out around folks who are all similar to you, they tend to ask similar questions and you are likely to end up nodding to “me too!”. When you meet someone who’s the opposite of you, or work in an industry you are familiar with, curiosity would drive the conversation and you get to expand your horizons.

#2 Spend time by yourself doing something that’s not related to your business.

Give yourself some private time to put work stuff at the back of your mind. The mind has the tremendous ability to work in the background. When you focus too much on a task, you tend to lose yourself in a microscopic view.

#3 Visit a different place each week.

Choose a different place to work at. Travel to a new city.

When you keep going to the same place over and over again, you become used to the environment and it becomes your comfort zone. Overtime, that creates a sense of routine and you don’t notice things happening around you anymore. You are more incline to retreat into your inner world and everything else around you is blocked out. However, when you check out somewhere new, the unfamiliar sights might set off an inspiration streak.

#4 Take an unfamiliar route home.

Or alight two to three bus stops earlier and walk to your destination. Walking helps to stimulate the brain and when you take a “foreign” route home, you tend to notice more of your surroundings and it gets your brain working.

#5 Check out online forums.

Especially if you do not have the opportunity to meet up with new people — online forums or Quora is a good place to be cognizant of varying perspectives in depth.

This will widen your perspective and create new neuron pathways in the brain and gets you out of your regular thought patterns.

#6 Read a different book.

If you do marketing, maybe it’s time to read a non-marketing book. If you want to create your own unique way of delivering messages, best thing you can do is to read overlapping topics or sometimes the odd fiction to break the standstill. Many times, when I immerse myself into a book meant to destress me, I put my worries at the back of my head and let my unconscious mind work its magic.

#7 Pick up a new hobby.

If you’ve been doing loads of brain work, you can pick up a new hobby that’s different from your professional work. It could be learning pilates, yoga, sewing or even learning a new instrument — a totally brand new activity puts you back in the learners’ mindset and this opens up more headspace when you let your mind relax while you just follow instructions.

#8 Watch funny movies.

Two weeks ago, I rewatched a couple of episodes of Friends, it was the lame kind of silly and didn’t require any brain work. Laughing at silly things readjust your mindset and enables you to view things in a more light-hearted way. Some people prefer a different genres to relax so it’s up to your personal choice. Personally, I always recommend a good comedy.

#9 Laugh very hard.

Remember Reader’s Digest from a long time ago? One of my favorite section was “Laughter is the best medicine”. It’s true. Laughter restores a emotionally positive climate and it also improves your mood by releasing endorphins.

Do you refill your think tank regularly?

What activities do you engage in produce a steady flow of creative ideas?