Explore the random, weird, and absurd
It's good to take a pause and dig into new topics that you haven't yet discovered or gone down the rabbit hole on. (For me right now it’s nuclear energy.)
Creative thinking doesn't happen by doing the same thing everyday. In your own work you need to find a way to inject outside sources of information for you to explore otherwise your ideas will get stale.
Intellectually you need more to ponder about so that you can stitch those odd and abstract ideas together. Call me crazy but I find the most interesting and creative people are those exploring random ideas.
You might not call it “work” to study any of the following topics:
Lontong cap go meh (Indonesian food dish)
Megachile toluca (species of bee)
Axel Corti (Austrian screenwriter and film director)
Ichigo Inc. (Japanese sustainable infrastructure company based in Tokyo)
Quasireversibility (mathematical theory of probability)
But you just never now what sorts of ideas you'll bridge in order for you to achieve that creative breakthrough for that problem you've been trying to solve.
Next time, try looking elsewhere to see what you'll find.
Go exploring.
