I have been self-employed most of my life. As such, I am used to looking for opportunities wherever I go. It is exhausting sometimes (as my wife often tells me) but it’s helped so much in my new incarnation as a screenwriter.
Writers use the ‘what if…’ scenario all day long to come up with new ideas for novels or screenplays. Taking an everyday occurrence and adding a ‘what if…’ to it to create a new scenario. Even taking old ideas like seeing Cinderella, for example, but wondering ‘what if…’ the story could be told from the prince’s perspective.
If you yearn for new experiences in life, I can’t recommend the technique highly enough. Instead of looking for jobs that already exist, try to see every experience as a new idea. When buying a sandwich, perhaps consider how you would improve what the purveyor has to offer. How would you do it? Or maybe when driving, think about how you would improve a car or road layouts.
I’m not suggesting you do any of these things for a living, but it’s like any muscle. The more you use it, the stronger your abilities become and before you know it, you may well be creating something truly ground-breaking and unique.
Of course, no one is inventing the wheel. All ideas are a recreation of something that came before. But adding your own twist on it does makes it fresh and if the world needs anything these days, it’s a fresh perspective on old ideas!