If you consume the same types of stories, information, entertainment, and ideas every day, your imagination keeps working with the same ingredients.

In Cross-Train Your Inputs, TJ Walker applies the idea of athletic cross-training to creativity. Runners lift weights. Swimmers practice other forms of movement. Creative people can benefit from deliberately exposing themselves to unfamiliar genres, subjects, styles, and perspectives.

Try the documentary you would normally skip. Read fiction if you always read business books. Explore a different genre. The goal is not to abandon what you enjoy. It is to give your imagination more raw material to recombine into unexpected ideas.

Cross-Train Your Inputs is an episode of The Creative Spark: Small Habits for a More Interesting Life, par ...