On creativity and coming up with ideas
What’s your preferred approach for coming up with good ideas? This podcast from The Accidental Creative suggests there are four steps to true creativity:
1) Preparation
2) Incubation
3) Illumination
4) Verification
While everyone seems to focus on that Eureka moment of illumination / inspiration (I tend to get them in the middle of long walks, or while reading a totally unrelated book), and agencies often focus on the first (the mythical perfect brief), the second and fourth of these are actually the most vital.
The best creative ideas need deliberation, interrogation, to be stepped away from and ignored for a while, then returned to with fresh eyes. They need to be poked, questioned, critiqued, bounced off other people, sense-checked, confirmed as not having been done before – all that good due diligence of verification. But creativity can’t be rushed.
At least, that’s the theory.
Sometimes, a ridiculous deadline is *exactly* what we need – even if it’s one of our own making, caused by dawdling on stage two until the last possible moment, or prevaricating with other, less important tasks. I tend to do that more often than I’d care to admit.
But then, we’re all different. The truth is creativity doesn’t follow a set formula or. If it did, it wouldn’t be creative. What it needs is the right mindset.