Thinking about a career change? Don't ask ChatGPT for help. Start by going shopping for toilet paper.

The next time you go to Target, Wal-Mart, or any other huge, air-conditioned, and sterile store, turn the drudgery of picking up detergent into a contest. Challenge yourself to spot something weird amidst the aisles.

That’s the premise of Big Box Archeologist, an activity included in Rob Walker’s book The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday.

Perhaps you’re thinking, the world is on fire —?why should we distract ourselves with strange games while we run errands? Because our brains need it.

I surveyed over 4,000 of my listeners for a project and 89% said it was “somewhat or extremely important to them to be innovative or experimental with their work.” And yet, some also said they feel like “they don’t have an innovative or creative bone in my body” or "they aren’t an ideas person.” Many said they want to reinvent themselves but don’t even know where to start. They’re fried.

We run around our lives and the internet, consuming ridiculous amounts of information, packing our calendars with meetings, filling our nights with Netflix…and then are frustrated that we can’t brainstorm on demand.

Despite stories about “ah-ha moments,” good ideas rarely arrive uninvited into people’s minds. As a 2021 study about creativity “myths” put it: “Emphasizing the role of inspiration rather than active engagement may undermine creativity by suggesting we need to wait until creativity hits us with a ‘Eureka’-experience.”

Creative thinking requires nurturing. We need to mulch our minds for original ideas to seed.

Rob has helped me respect this process. He wrote his book after realizing that some of his students were struggling to recognize a good idea when they had one. Many told Rob they didn’t know what to write for his class — because they didn’t think their thoughts were that relevant. Their observations weren’t “trending,” they explained, and therefore were a waste of time, right?This frustrated Rob immensely.

“I feel pretty strongly that the exact opposite is true,” Rob told me. “The things you notice that no one else notices are the most important things for your creativity, for your innovation. If you’re an artist, if you’re a manager, if you want to be an entrepreneur, that process starts by noticing something that other people have overlooked.”

In a world that rewards being in the know, how do you develop the capacity to pay attention to the things no one else cares about? How do you decide what matters to you, not everyone else?

Rob put together a series of exercises and meditations designed to help us all do more noticing, including the Big Box Archeologist game. A recent favorite find of Rob’s was Pop-Tarts cereal. A child of the 80's, he had no idea that teeny-tiny, pourable pop-tarts were a thing. Happening upon them both delighted and disgusted him. He took a picture of a box and sent it to his wife.

To be clear, it’s not like you have to then rush home and write an award-winning article on the transformation of mid-20th century sugary breakfast treats into various formations —?but by continuously developing the capacity to stop, contemplate, and be amused by how weird our world is, your brain stays in shape. Sure, you might be thinking about tiny pop tarts today, but perhaps it will spur you to contemplate a topic of greater gravitus tomorrow.

I believe that some of us have had good ideas locked up in our brains for so long, we’ve stopped seeing them... like an unpacked box of books that has sat in the corner of a bedroom for years.

To help my listeners prepare their brains for inspiration as part of a project about career change, I asked them (with Rob’s help) to take a slow stroll through their living room and note the weirdest thing they saw. They spotted, among other things, a hamster sitting at his desk in his cage, a leg sculpture kicking out of a fireplace, and a lonely, old-fashioned seltzer bottle.

I then challenged them to sit quietly for 15 minutes and list every potential job, business partner, product idea, business model or strategy they’ve been thinking about or that popped into their head.

Many of them indeed had "a-ha" moments. One listener who wants to pivot to an environmental career included ideas like becoming a wildlife rehabilitator, a hydroponics gardener, or a developer of homes with net-zero emissions. But she also came up with less, totally life-upending ideas to get more nature into her day through new hobbies, like birding or woodworking. She realized she had options.

For better and worse, we need to start applying the creative process to our professional lives.

We can’t rely on corporations or the government to give stable career paths or incomes. It’s also going to take a lot of creative thinking to come up with new jobs, new business models, new organizations to fix a lot of society’s problems.

If that feels daunting and you’re not sure you can come up with any good ideas, think of yourself as a PRE-ideas person.

Give yourself permission to get weird in a very small way. Doing so might give your brain the signal to see your world differently.