There’s two ways to intake information: books/media, and conversations with people. The one way to output information is to do personal projects.
Our ability to come up with ideas is a function of what we consume, along with the mental swishing between input and output.
To consume unconventional information, find media that disagrees with you and come from niche places, and find people who think in fundamentally different mindsets¹ to you. This makes social media terrible, as algorithms push content that most people like, regressing the viewer’s mind to the mean.
No other person in the world has the same inputs over their entire lives as we do. The more we swish an idea in our heads, the more individualized and therefore original it becomes. To speed up the progress we make on ideas per unit of time spent, we should write.
Finally, we should be outputting as much as we can, both in conversation with people and through personal projects. It doesn’t matter in the beginning the originality of the things we put out into the world are, because the feedback and results we receive on these projects reorient us in a more original direction.
Ray Dalio’s 7th Principle for Success - Be Radically Open Minded