No, You Can't Have An Idea Right Now

This post is coming from the perspective of a frustrated copywriter who cannot write a paragraph of body copy to save his life right now. It’s coming from the perspective of a videographer who can’t comprehend why his transition isn’t working. It’s coming from the perspective of a creative director who cannot for the life of them figure out their campaign’s rallying cry.

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It is so hard to formulate great ideas on demand. It’s just not the creative way.

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James Webb Young is one of the greats of advertising. His books, despite being published in 1939, are still read in colleges across the world, and his influence on the field is comparable to that of David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. In one of those books, he suggests the following as the best process for ideation:

1. Immersion
2. Digestion
3. Incubation
4. Illumination
5. Verification

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That third step is something that has plagued me in the past. Whether I like it or not, I know I can’t skip it. I can do all the work I want, and dedicate as much time to thinking as I want, but it won’t matter. That’s just not how good ideas are formed.

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So how do you build in step 3?

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First of all, it’s important to acknowledge that creatives are never off the clock. Out of office? Sure. But it’s important that you’re ready to put pen to paper at a moment’s notice. The best ideas are truly like lightning in a bottle– and it’s famously hard to catch lightning in a bottle. This is why great creatives carry notebooks, or even have a Notes App to dump their ideas. You simply must be prepared to write your ideas down. That said, it’s also why they never promise winning ideas after a day. In particular, freelance creatives need space to breathe. When you’re not bound to the schedule of an office, you can seemingly be in “work mode” all the time, letting your tasks ruminate 24 hours a day. That mindset didn’t work for Young, and it won’t work for modern creatives either.

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In office, creatives experience a different set of issues. Particularly when working at an agency, incubation time is impossible to come by. There are countless tasks thrown at you each and every day, each requiring a great deal of creative brainpower. Whether these tasks are long or short term, they add up. To say I’ve cracked the code on this would be an absolute lie. That said, I’ve picked up on a few things. For one, I like multitasking. It helps me build in an incubation period for each individual task. If I can’t work through one project, I just shift to another. Eventually, the right idea is going to come, and then I switch back! It’s not a perfect system, but it certainly helps. It’s especially helpful to switch creative mediums. I’ll often work on writing and videography projects at the same time, and use the work time for one piece of work as the incubation period for another.

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When Young wrote his creative process, he included incubation for a reason. Some of our best work as a team comes from taking time to work on anything else, only for someone to stumble across the winning idea at two in the morning. In a world with so much stimulation, there are an infinite number of “muses” that one can encounter. Those are rarely at the office, and that’s okay! It’s also why creatives need more than a day to come up with ideas.

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Good ideas take days, months, even years to reach their full potential. It’s why the biggest artists in the world have music sitting in the vault for years, and it’s why the creative types in your office are so picky. If they have the time and energy, they will produce. Just don’t push them to the point of burning out :)

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