Mental blocks

Section 3 : Innovation means thinking beyond what's been tried

When you’re blocked, you usually don’t need more ideas. You need different ones. And that requires something harder than brainstorming: letting go of the ideas you’ve already attached yourself to.

That product you keep revising might not be the one. That pitch you keep tweaking might be the wrong story. That model you keep optimising might be built on assumptions that no longer serve you.

Mental blocks love efficiency. They tell you to fix what you’ve already built, not to ask if you should be building something else entirely. But real innovation sometimes means starting again. And not because you failed, but because you finally saw the limits of the path you were on.