Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

The physical athlete needs fuel to function properly. Similarly your brain cannot function at peak fitness unless you feed it with large volumes of ideas.

Coming up with other uses for familiar objects can be difficult at first. Your mind tends to stick with familiar associations you have about the object. Chopsticks are an eating implement.

The point of this exercise is not to see how many crazy impractical ideas you can come up with, but to see if you can leap over the self imposed mental bubble that keep you within a close distance of the chopstick concept. If you have a challenge you may find that you can't escape from the mental bubble. Practise at this type of exercise will help you find new solutions to challenges.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few

The following show some examples. I had some difficulty with coming up with ideas at my desk. Once I got away fresh ideas began to flow. The left set are more obvious. The right set are less so and may involve modifying the chopsticks in some way.

It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have a new idea, you are a minority of one"
E Paul Torrance.

You may say modifying the chopsticks is cheating. But...if you want to come up with novel solutions to your challenges you have to cheat on assumptions, rules, first thoughts and normality. So start learning to cheat these things now.

If an idea seems weird alter it in some way to make it more practical - but whatever you do don't throw it away immediately'.

A trick to use, to help you come up with new ideas, is to think of something other than your chopsticks, say the garden, then work backwards and think of how chopsticks could be used in the garden, modified or unmodified.

On the way home from work I picked random objects and related them back to the chopsticks - sheep, wool -> knitting needles, waper -> water diviners, etc