Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Shows his view on the subject of unlocking imagination, doesn’t it?

Imagination is an integral part of the human mind that covers both the creative and learning spheres. Increasing one’s imagination creates possibilities. It is considered to be the creative faculty of the mind that helps a person in process-oriented activities, such as thinking, memorizing, remembering or opinion forming. A rich imagination can enable a person to pursue and accomplish many great things. There are various ways to enrich one’s imagination how one can enrich imagination.

A crucial aspect of creative thinking is the capacity to imagine. As an author and educational advisor Sir Ken Robinson once said: “Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement.”
Without imagination, our ability to blend ideas, to see things not as they are but as they might be, is greatly hindered. If we cannot imagine new possibilities, our ability to think creatively is limited. How can we think of ways that generate novel and worthwhile ideas if we keep coming back to existing and proven ideas?

To improve our imagination, we must look to the source of our perceptions: our knowledge.

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” – Carl Sagan

Here are 21 ways to increase imagination for better creative thinking:

• Be curious

Learning new things sparks creativity and increases imagination. A part of learning new things is curious. Children tend to be more imaginative because of their curious nature. Our inherent nature to seek answers or to learn new things does not disappear overage. Feed curiosity by learning and experiencing new things and notice how your imagination improves. Feed your curiosity by asking questions and build your ideas with the help of insight from others.

• Collaborate with creative people

Synergize your energies by spending time with people who share the same interest as yours. Brainstorming, planning, or simply talking to people will keep creative juices running, giving new and fresh ideas.
Unlocking imagination … open your mind
Creativity is often tagged together with originality. To come up with new ideas may be challenging and even often daunting, as unexplored paths may pose unexpected threats. It is also an avenue where one can find genuine ideas that can result in a successful endeavor.

• Tell stories

People love to listen to stories, and each person has a story to tell. Practice imaginative and creative thinking by telling as many stories as you can. Let it be descriptive. Let it allow you and your listener to visualize what is being told. Visualization is an important part of increasing imagination. Visualization is often perceived as one’s ability to create a clear and vivid picture in mind. This concept entails various senses as well. Visualization also involves one’s sense of touch, smell, taste, and other senses. Visualization enables you to imagine the story being told or the object being described. The more imaginative and creative the mind becomes, the more elaborate one’s visualizations can be.

• Think in metaphors

Thinking about problems metaphorically moves your thinking from the literal to the abstract so that you can move freely on a different plane. To a literal thinker, a rose is a rose; to a metaphorical thinker, a rose could be a young woman’s cheek, a seductive trap, or the morning sky before a storm.

• Expand your interests
  Passion fuels creativity. Expand your interests by shifting your focus to include other interests that you may be passionate about.

• Learn different things

Learning sparks creativity and imagination. One’s willingness to learn new things gauges one’s ability to accept and adapt to change. It improves one’s adaptability to imaginative reasoning and creative thinking.

• Find inspiration from other businesses creators

(OP’s note - this was written from a marketing standpoint, so replacing “business” with “creators” to improve relevancy for our purposes). Your next idea won’t come from copying what a competitor has already done. So look for innovation in from different industries and niches creators.

• Research what businesses creators are dominating. Why?

• To what businesses creator are you most loyal? Why?

• How can you transfer what worked for businesses creators outside your industry genre to yours? Maybe you can improve on these ideas.
  Taking inspiration from other industries creators is a great way to boost your creativity.

• Do something you love

Stuck for ideas? Not sure what to do? Your life needs some balance to ensure your creativity doesn’t suffer.

In a letter to his son, Albert Einstein provided a great bit of fatherly insight when addressing his son’s interest in playing the piano that applies to losing yourself in the creative process: do something that pleases you.

“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes,” Einstein wrote. “I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal.”

Love and creativity are intertwined. A hobby, such as playing an instrument, running, or collecting memorabilia, can help you relax and fight stress while giving your creativity a boost.

• Take different perspectives

At the points when you feel tired or bored, and, and you feel that your creativity is running low, look at things in a new perspective. This will give you a fresh approach to things that may even trigger new ideas that you once thought were not possible.

• Try something new.

It is often said that if you keep on doing the same things, then you will keep on receiving the same things. Challenge yourself to experience new things or embark on new adventures and endeavors.

• Throw away preconditioned notions

What is it that you have always told yourself, are you lacking in creativity or originality? Stop these thoughts; your mind is telling you things that aren’t true. Remember impermanence? Every moment is like a refresh; you are a blank canvas. Choose what you want to fill your canvas with. Tap in and experience your truest form, you are a rich, alive and buzzing and nothing will change that.

• Research unknowns

Always be inquisitive and most importantly listen to others without trying to form a reply. You have so much to learn from your fellow peers. Carry a Notebook and write ideas down; you might be surprised where inspiration finds you.

• Carefully observe

Have you noticed what’s going on around you or are you still stuck in your racing mind? Pay attention to what other successful people are doing. Talk less and listen more.

• Daydream

Daydreaming is more deliberate than merely dreaming, which makes it more effective in opening your mind to possibilities. Edgar Allan Poe says, “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

You can amuse yourself by speculating on these things, and it will soon become a habit. It can one day trigger an idea for a book, or for a new product that may change your life.

• Play

Hopscotch may not do much for your imagination, but playing games like Dungeons and Dragons or Minecraft can get you going down the path of imagination. Fortunately for you, you can legitimately play your heart out nowadays with nary a cocked eyebrow. Use it.

• Creative power

What can be more imagination-stirring than producing something creative? Creating something all your sparks your motivation to explore your potential further. Touch is a sense that is often underrated, but it carries a plethora of emotional responses. It excites your sense of accomplishment, making you want to go as far as you can. Seeing something take shape even as you are contemplating your next step is heady, and it will drive your imagination to new heights.

• Think in pictures

Many people assume Einstein was a logical, left-brain thinker, but he was the opposite. Rather than using mathematics or language to crack a tough problem, he preferred to think in pictures and spatial relationships. He recognized that visual thinking could strip a problem down to its essence, leading to profoundly simple conclusions that ordinary language might not be able to reach.

• Build a bridge

To build a bridge between what we know and what’s possible, we must do two things.

First, we must build knowledge and gain new understandings of the world. If our minds can only imagine possibilities within the context of what we already know, then it’s clear we must increase that knowledge if we want to increase what we can imagine.

Thankfully, knowledge is easily gained if you dedicate even a small amount of time to it.

The second thing we must do to increase our imaginations, once we have begun to build our knowledge, is to remain powerfully curious about that knowledge, even humorously so.

We can do this by asking questions constantly, not only about new things we experience but about everything old and true as well.

• Learn through collaboration

Andrew Ng, formerly of Google and now of Baidu, is one who doesn’t believe innovation is due to unpredictable flashes of genius. Rather, he said you can become more creative and innovative systematically.

“In my own life, I found that whenever I wasn’t sure what to do next, I would go and learn a lot, read a lot, talk to experts. I don’t know how the human brain works but it’s almost magical: when you read enough or talk to enough experts when you have enough inputs, new ideas start appearing.”

Indeed, collaborating with and learning from others may be just what you need to give your creativity a boost.

OP’s closing note - the source for above is a marketing website that happened to have some excellent advice, succinctly summarized. I’ve made a some clearly marked edits above to make a bit more relevant for the 13th Floor, and chosen to post it despite the source as it describes a fair number of the dynamics presently driving our imagination engine.