All ideas I come up with are made up of a library of existing ideas. It is impossible to come up with an idea without building material. So it helps to be on th

All ideas I come up with are made up of a library of existing ideas. It is impossible to come up with an idea without building material. So it helps to be on the lookout for new material. The form doesn't matter: books, knowledgeable people, nature, visuals, even fantasy. But then, just like in architecture, there are ways of arranging the material. How to put together ideas, for various sorts of purposes? There are so many disciplines, so many fields of knowledge and human activity. It's dizzying. The key is to build up heuristics to create meaning, to create coherence, internally. For learning to build internal coherence/structure, first, it is useful to learn about the fields that teach you to abstract: mathematics and philosophy, certain types of computing, etc. Listen to lectures from serious and dedicated researchers, pay attention to every word, extract different styles of thinking. Once you build up the power of abstraction, sail through various existing disciplines, you'll be able to find things that others have missed. For instance, if you're a trained elite programmer/computing person, you can have new ways of looking at rock climbing or mountaineering. In summary: new ideas, new structure/coherence = library of ideas + abstraction + analogies I probably do other things as well, but this is what I'd start with.