Agreed with michael. To the OP: life will provide you with plenty of experiences. You don't need to look for problems because they are masqueraded as ineffici

Agreed with michael. To the OP: life will provide you with plenty of experiences. You don't need to look for problems because they are masqueraded as inefficiencies and frustrations. When you notice yourself frustrated, ask: why am I frustrated? What is frustrating? How can things be improved? Coming up with ideas is a creative process. Creativity is a muscle that can be trained. A simple exercise is to take, say, a pencil and name as many uses for it as possible. That's not useful in reality as it's not directly related to a problem. You could, alternatively, find a problem, such as an itchy back or uneven desk legs, and think of ways to use the pencil. Thinking of using the pencil is easy. What's very hard is you have to remember the pencil, keeping it in the subsurface of your mind as you encounter problems. Of course, this is a grossly simplified example, but this is how problem solving works: by observing situations, remembering the attributes/qualities of objects (or resources) and appropriately recalling them when they can be a possible solution to the problem you are facing. Most people brainstorm the first way. They look for what they want to do, and find ways to make it work. Like michael mentioned, it is nice if you are doing something for fun, but it is not good for generating viable business ideas. The best business ideas are organic, as in they come from a real problem. People are usually happy to pay to make a problem go away, provided the solution improves their lives in some tangible way. I would argue that the second way of brainstorming - the indirect way - is more powerful because you are training yourself to add constraints by tracking existing resources and recognizing when they are useful in a seemingly random problem with no obvious connection to the object in question. Back to our example: when you have an itchy back, there is not necessarily a pencil in sight. You have to pull it into your mind's eye. You are essentially turning your mind into a database or file cabinet; a must-have skill if you want to be a top-notch tech support person or creative problem solver. This is the secret behind the hype about connecting-the-dots and ideation. It's very easy to talk about, but very, very hard to practice.