If you want to get ideas, don’t kill them:
“An idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”
Then, aside not killing ideas, how do you get (more of) them? I thought that I’d share with you some of the thoughts I had during my latest read, Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas. Jack is a former creative director in the advertising industry (in which he has worked for 35 years), and the people in that business are among some of the most creative on the planet.
Don’t you know these people who seem to be able to come up with ideas one after another—they could put them onto an assembly line if they wanted to. How on earth do they do it? Jack has a very good story:
When I was a kid I hung around with a guy named Johnny-Boy Boyd. JB was a klutz. Accidents just seemed to happen to him; if one didn’t run into him, he ran into it. Nowadays psychologists would say that subconsciously JB made accidents happen, that it was his way of getting attention. Back then we just called him “accident prone” and let it go at that. As an adult I hung around with people who were “idea prone.” Ideas just seemed to happen to them the way accidents happened to JB.
So how do we get ideas to “happen to us”? I think one of the most important things is putting your mind, both your conscious and sub-conscious, to it. If you think you can’t (or don’t want to) get new ideas, then you won’t get them.
After that, I think the most important thing is to feed your mind with raw material. The reason for this is that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.” (James Webb Young). So, if an idea is a combination of something you know, then you better know a lot.
What’s frustrating, however, is you don’t know what you need know. Again, looking at the very idea-prone people you know, notice how they know crazy details about crazy stuff. They suck information out of everything, because what if they need it?
One way of going about this is to do new and different things all the time. Read new books, different books, do different things, meet new people—and—ask a lot of questions; obvious questions, stupid questions, questions that have already been asked, questions that have never been asked. In this way, you’ll position yourself better to get new ideas, I’m sure… or that’s what Jack Foster says in his book anyway, and I think he is on to something.
Another thing that I think he is on to, is the paradox of creativity within limits. Sometimes, posing limitations on your creative process can help idea generation. He offers a story from his teaching, where he tells his students over-night to produce a poster for a Swiss Army knife. The next day, students complain that it was so difficult—and some were not able to do it at all. In another class, he gives the students the same task, however, they need to come up with 10 proposals for the poster—not for the next day, but for after the lunch break. The result was dramatically different, and the students were much better at producing ideas.
It is a paradox. In The Courage to Create, Rollo May calls it a “phenomenon.” But he explains “that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”
This post is already too long, so let me just finish with yet another quotation from the book:
Man can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for year on end.
–Kent Ruth
Let it better not be us that do not get a new thought for years on end :-).
The book is extremely well written has countless anecdotes, which you will want to read if you like well-placed stories that illustrate important points (about the process of getting ideas).
Read more:
(All quotes in this post are from Jack Foster’s book, if you had not figured it out already :-) ).