Most advice about developing your imagination starts with someone else.
We study successful founders and inventors, follow creative people’s routines, and learn their methods.
There is value in understanding how other people create, but their process tells you how their imagination works. It does not necessarily tell you how to access your own.
Imagination is personal before it is practical. That is what makes it difficult to teach. We tend to focus on the process and execution of creativity because both are easier to explain and follow.
What is harder to explain is what caused someone to imagine the possibility in the first place.
If imagination allows us to conceive possibilities beyond what currently exists, developing it starts with understanding the scenarios that activate yours.
Imagination Does Not Work the Same Way for Everyone
There is no one-size-fits-all framework for imagination.
Some people find their imagination activates through solitude while others find it through interaction. Imagination can activate through writing, analyzing a problem, responding to your surroundings, or talking with other people.
The activity itself does not have to appear creative. What matters is what starts happening in your mind while you are doing it.
This is why following another person’s creative process can only take you so far. Their process may work because of what it activates for them, not because the activity itself produces imagination.
You first have to recognize when possibilities naturally start occurring to you.
Understand What Activates Your Imagination
Developing your imagination begins by noticing the scenarios that activate it. These are common sources that can help you recognize where your imagination naturally becomes active:
- Self-Exploration: How you naturally approach your own experiences, problems, and decisions can activate your imagination.
- What You Value: What matters to you personally can activate your imagination, whether that is research, fashion, technology, travel, or something entirely different.
- Day-to-Day Life: Ordinary routines, conversations, and unexpected moments within everyday life can give your imagination something to work with.
- Comfort and Familiarity: Familiar places, routines, and environments where you feel comfortable can create space for your imagination to activate.
- Entertainment: Whatever genuinely entertains you, from music and hobbies to experimentation or observation, can become a source of imagination.
- Work and Problem-Solving: Practical problems, criticism, and attempts to improve how something works can activate imagination through the work itself.
- Relationships: How you interact with, understand, and relate to other people can activate your imagination through one-to-one or shared experiences.
- Deep Reflection: Researching, questioning, analyzing, and thinking beneath the obvious explanation can activate your imagination through deeper understanding.
- Exploration and Perspective: Encountering different beliefs, cultures, or worldviews can activate your imagination by expanding how you understand what is possible.
- Achievement and Expertise: Seeing what someone else has achieved or become can activate your imagination for what you might pursue or approach differently.
- Communities and Culture: Observing how people socialize, behave collectively, form interests, and respond to emerging culture can activate your imagination.
- Solitude and Your Internal World: Dreams, fantasies, and uninterrupted internal thoughts can give you space to recognize intuitive fit within your own imagination.
Rather than categorizing these as types of imagination, think of them as possible sources for your imagination.
Your imagination may activate through one of these scenarios or several of them. They can also overlap. You may also discover that something commonly associated with creativity does very little for you.
The scenario matters because of what is happening for you within it, not because the activity belongs exclusively to one category.
The goal is not to pigeonhole yourself. It is to become more conscious of where, when, and through what scenarios your imagination naturally becomes active.
Inspiration Does Not Always Activate Your Imagination
Listening to an accomplished founder or designer describe how they created something might inspire you to believe that something difficult is possible. That is inspiration.
Your imagination requires something else to happen. The experience has to lead you to conceive possibilities of your own.
We often look to accomplished people to become more creative because their work shows us what is possible and their process gives us something to learn from.
For some people, that exposure may genuinely activate their imagination. For others, it may provide motivation, confidence, or a new perspective without producing new possibilities at all.
Neither is wrong. The important thing is knowing the difference.
Otherwise, it is easy to spend enormous amounts of time consuming things you believe are making you more imaginative when they are actually inspiring you.
Develop Your Imagination Through Deliberate Exposure
Once you recognize the scenarios that activate your imagination, you can become more intentional about what you expose yourself to.
- If unfamiliar environments allow you to imagine possibilities, experience more of them.
- If conversation activates your imagination, talk to people outside your usual circles.
- If problem-solving activates it, spend time understanding why something does not work instead of only finding the quickest solution.
Imagination does not operate independently from what you have experienced. The places, problems, and experiences you encounter can become reference points from which new possibilities are imagined.
The more you expose yourself to material within the scenarios that activate your imagination, the more it has to work with.
Practice Makes Intuitive Fit Easier to Recognize
Natural abilities can make imagination easier, but what eventually appears effortless is often the result of practice.
- A talented musician still has to play.
- A talented writer still has to write.
- A talented painter still has to paint.
Someone who has spent years immersed in a field accumulates more than explicit knowledge. They have encountered exceptions, failures, patterns, and possibilities repeatedly enough that intuitive fit becomes easier to recognize within what they imagine, even before they can fully explain why.
Not every possibility has to become an innovation for imagining it to have value. Sometimes it is worth developing an imagined possibility simply to see what happens when you give it greater form.
It may never become real, but developing the possibility allows you to practice the capability. As you continue practicing, recognizing intuitive fit within what you imagine becomes easier and more instinctive.
Note: Practice develops imagination because the results of imagining become material for future imagination.
Let Imagination Be Imagination Before You Rationalize It
Do not make the mistake of turning imagination into another process.
A child can ask what would happen if a banana were a bird without first determining whether it is logical. The possibility is allowed to exist because it has not been asked to become anything else.
Adults often have a harder time doing this because we can rationalize a possibility almost as quickly as we imagine it by questioning its realism. In the innovation process, that tends to look like:
- Could we manufacture it?
- Would anyone buy it?
- Does the technology exist?
- Has someone already done it?
- Does this make sense?
Those are legitimate questions, but imagination does not need to answer them yet. Imagination needs enough room to consider what could exist before being required to explain how it would exist.
Protect What You Have Not Finished Imagining
Allowing imagination to remain imagination also means recognizing when something is ready to be shared.
A future possibility can make sense to you before you know how to make it understandable to others. When you communicate it too early, the other person can only evaluate what you are capable of explaining at that moment.
If you repeatedly expose an imagined possibility to evaluation before you understand what you are imagining, you can begin applying that evaluation yourself.
The possibility starts getting corrected before it has been fully considered within your imagination.
Before other perspectives can help develop what you are imagining, you need enough space to understand what you are seeing in the first place.
What Happens Instinctively Can Be Developed Deliberately
Developing your imagination starts with observing the scenarios in which it naturally activates.
Over time, you can distinguish what activates your imagination from what simply inspires you and become more intentional about placing yourself in those scenarios and giving your imagination more material to work with.
Through practice, what once happened instinctively becomes something you understand well enough to develop deliberately. You become more familiar with how possibilities occur to you and better able to recognize intuitive fit within what you imagine.
The better you understand and develop your imagination, the more capable you become of conceiving possibilities beyond what currently exists and recognizing what within them may be worth further consideration.
Becoming better at imagining possibilities allows for you to recognize out of everything you see, experience, and imagine what belongs to your creative point of view.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF