by Todd Henry
Conceptual (solutions to similar problems): cruise director, prizes, program director, Disney World ride lines, et cetera . . .
Concrete (specific attributes of the problem): delays, cramped, boring interior, bad food, et cetera . . .
Once you’ve written ten to twelve words per column, start choosing two words, each from a different column, and see if an idea is sparked. For example: Cruise Director + Surprise = Have special celebrity “hosts” for random domestic flights.
Game + Prizes = Create a game for passengers in which they can compete for prizes.
Thrill + Boring Interior = Install a projection surface in the aisle of the plane, and a camera on the bottom exterior, then make the aisle look transparent to passengers by projecting a live image of what’s underneath the plane at any given moment.
Write down everything that comes to mind, regardless of how impractical it seems. You’d be surprised at how many brilliant ideas are lurking just beyond your initial inhibitions. Often the first fifteen to twenty minutes of Idea Time will seem fruitless, but as you push through the temptation to check your e-mail or do something on your task list, you will find yourself gaining traction on the problem. It takes our minds a bit of time to adjust and focus on what we’re really trying to do.
“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
—C. S. Lewis
Because we so frequently field questions about what to do during these Idea Times, our team at Accidental Creative has developed a tool called the Personal Idea Pad (PIP) to help people generate ideas quickly and in a process-oriented way. It uses the Future/Past/Conceptual/Concrete framework to surround a Challenge and then free-associates concepts to find potentially useful ideas. We’ve found it very helpful for strategists, brand managers, and others who are more process oriented than more traditionally artistic types, though many designers and other more traditional creatives have said that it has provided them with a fresh way to tackle their problems. Additionally, we’ve found that having such a tool at the ready increases the effectiveness of Idea Time, especially as a starting point for new creative problems. (You can learn more about the Personal Idea Pad and purchase one at AccidentalCreative.com/book.)
As a warning: You will probably have regular Idea Times in which nothing of significance is generated. You will spend an hour spinning your wheels with little traction. This is OK. Remember that this is an investment, not something we’re doing for a quick payoff. If you persist and continue the practice, you will also have times when you generate brilliant ideas in the first ten minutes—potentially business-changing ideas. Remember that tremendous value can be created in incredibly small amounts of time. You invest your time, focus, and energy in important problems, and you reap a return on the other side. It may take a while, but it’s well worth it.
Jessie, a member of our online coaching community, AC Engage, said that prior to implementing Idea Time she struggled to maintain her energy level in her day job as an in-house graphic designer. She shared that the combination of establishing effective Challenges and Idea Time has been critical to her increased enthusiasm and performance. “I can’t be on all the time, but giving myself small statements to focus on—like the Challenges—keeps my day on track. And I have found that I look forward to my Idea Time. I am excited to see what I can dig out of my own ideas after I get through the simple answers.” We often see that increased enthusiasm is the result of clearing space to think about creative problems. Much of the angst and hesitation creatives feel toward their work is the result of fear and dissonance, which can be overcome with this structured thought time.
Make certain that you record all ideas that come out of your Idea Time, regardless of how irrelevant they may seem. Keep them in your notebook, or wherever you keep your notes, and review them often. Many times the best ideas for new projects are ones that were castoffs from other projects. If you make it a practice to value every idea by recording it, you’ll be surprised how often you’ll pull from these seemingly irrelevant ideas in the middle of a meeting on a completely different topic.
I frequently encourage teams to build this same Idea Time structure into their organizational rhythms. Getting the team together on a regular basis, perhaps once per month, to generate ideas around a nonurgent problem facing the organization is great practice for those times when there is a more urgent need for ideas. A sixty-minute session can yield ideas that carry over to other projects and become useful in alternative contexts.
Putting time on your calendar to generate ideas is worth it. It will change your life and your career. Remember: Successful, consistently brilliant people do the little (too obvious, too simple, too commonsensical) things that no one else is doing. This is what will set you apart, too.
PRACTICING WITH UNNECESSARY CREATING
In The Artist’s Way, creativity expert Julia Cameron shares a practice she stumbled upon while living in New Mexico and recovering from yet another in a series of career disasters. Every morning, she writes out three pages, longhand, of pure stream of consciousness. In describing her method for “morning pages,” Cameron says there is no need for editing or structuring the content. The entire purpose of the exercise is to get the brain moving and to circumvent any potential barriers to creative breakthroughs. “When people ask, ‘Why do we write morning pages?’ I joke, ‘To get to the other side,’ ” she explains. “They think I am kidding, but I’m not. Morning pages do get us to the other side: the other side of our fear, of our negativity, of our moods. Above all they get us beyond our Censor.”
What Cameron is advocating through the practice of morning pages is the act of Unnecessary Creating, creating for ourselves rather than for others. When we spend much of our time in on-demand creating, we can quickly lose touch with the passions that fuel our best work. We grow used to leveraging our abilities for the sole purpose of meeting others’ expectations, and much of it is driven by hitting our marks rather than by exploring new possibilities. The ironic part is that this personal creative passion is the most critical thing we bring to the work we do. Creating on demand often causes us to lose the edge that fuels our best work and sometimes causes us to shrink from risk because of the potential consequences of failure.
When we create unnecessarily, we are setting our own agenda. We have permission to try new things, develop new skills, and make things solely for ourselves. If we fail, it’s no big deal because we’re the client. We can take as much or as little time as we need to get it right. The main purpose is to put our ideas into fixed form and to attempt things that we might not get to try in our day job. We can stretch ourselves, explore fringe ideas that intimidate us, and make things that no one but us will ever see. Without this practice in our life, we can become creatively stuck. We may experience a backup of ideas and thoughts, and the weight of all that we’re not doing becomes a source of resentment and even guilt. We may feel like we’re subverting our own life and passions for the sake of everyone else.
But who says this has to be the case? Your on-demand work is certainly a significant part of your life, but it cannot contain the sum of your creative effort. If you’re looking for your on-demand work to be the expression of everything you have to offer, you will wind up very frustrated and go to your grave with your best ideas unrealized. The best way to prevent this is to carve time into your daily and weekly rhythms to work on the ideas that our on-demand role can’t accommodate.
In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford argues that there is a satisfaction to be gained from doing hands-on creating that can’t be gained through more conceptual work. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” he writes. “They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.” Even though we
don’t always get to experience the satisfaction of completion in our on-demand role, Unnecessary Creating affords us this opportunity.
At this point some of us may be thinking, “I barely have the time and energy to do what’s required of me for my job, and now you want me to take up a hobby?” It’s tempting to resist this technique because we think it will add stress to our lives—yet another thing we have to cram into our schedule. But the experience of those who incorporate this practice is quite different. They find that it actually clarifies their thoughts, makes them more efficient, and reintroduces a level of passion for their on-demand creating. In addition, our Unnecessary Creating is often the best source of new insights for our on-demand creative work.
Robert, a creative director for a large brand-design firm, spent hours over the course of several weeks telling me about the stresses and pressures of his role. He told me that expectations were on the rise and that he had little authority to hire or shift organizational priorities to lessen the strain. He was stretched thin and had no room to breathe. I think he was expecting me to offer up some tips on time management, but to his surprise I asked him about his personal creating.
“What do you do for yourself?” I asked. “Do you create anything with your hands?”
He replied that it had been a very long time since he’d done much hands-on creating. Robert was at a point in his career where he was mostly directing others and rarely experiencing the satisfaction of actually doing the work. After a little more questioning, I discovered that Robert had once enjoyed painting with watercolors as a hobby, but it had been years since he’d had time to pick up a brush. As I probed further, I could sense his excitement building just talking about it. I challenged him to go to the store after work that day and pick up some watercolor materials. He agreed, and over the remainder of the week, I checked in a few times to see how things were going with his rediscovered hobby.
Over subsequent weeks, Robert and I would get together to talk about life and work, and I could see that there was a level of passion returning to our conversation. Engaging in something strictly for himself had unlocked a level of enthusiasm that had been subverted for years in the interest of practicality. Once he had permission to engage in something strictly for his own pleasure, he began to come alive, and I could tell that this was affecting not only his personal outlook but his creative engagement as well.
I’ve seen this happen with many others as well. Gardening, landscaping, writing, planning a side business, editing home movies, or anything else that provides an outlet for your passion and curiosity can be considered Unnecessary Creating. The main qualifications are that (1) the activity is something you really enjoy and (2) there is no time frame for completion of the work other than those you set.
GETTING STARTED WITH UNNECESSARY CREATING
As with Idea Time, Unnecessary Creating should have a set regular time for engaging in this creativity-inducing practice. Building this predictable infrastructure for your Unnecessary Creating will give you something to look forward to and will create a break in the middle of your hectic weekly rhythm. I’d recommend an hour per week as a starting place, but if you’re really stretched, you can begin with an hour every other week.
One benefit of Unnecessary Creating is that it gives you the opportunity to regularly experience the phenomenon referred to as “flow.” This is a term coined by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the sensation of “getting lost” in your work. One of the main contributors to flow is doing work that challenges your skills and requires your full creative capacity. When this happens, you lose all sense of time, becoming completely immersed in what you’re doing. People who experience flow regularly report that they are able to access parts of their creative capacity that remain dormant during their less challenging work because they aren’t required to take risks or stretch themselves.
Why is this important? Because this kind of stretching, skilldeveloping activity increases your capacity across the boards. You cannot separate your on-demand creating from your personal creating. When you develop skills during your Unnecessary Creating time, you gradually find those same skills and experiences being unleashed in your on-demand creating. You are exercising parts of your mind that may otherwise begin to atrophy. Unfortunately, the adage “use it or lose it” is an accurate admonishment for creatives. You need to make certain that you’re not neglecting key passion areas or skills in your life just because your on-demand role doesn’t regularly require you to use them.
“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”
—Alan Alda
What should Unnecessary Creating time consist of? One technique is to keep all your potential projects in a Project Queue. Anything goes! Editing family movies, writing a short story or essay, rearranging your furniture, songwriting, developing a concept for a new business, or anything that requires you to exercise a degree of creative thought can count for your Unnecessary Creating. Keep a small whiteboard on your wall at home, and use it to track ideas for Unnecessary Creating projects you’d like to work on, or simply keep a list in your notebook or on your computer. Once you list the projects, you may want to simply attack them in sequential order during your Unnecessary Creating time. Some of these may be shorter projects, taking less than an hour, and some may be longer-term projects that require a week or more of your planned times. Regardless, it’s best to work your way through the list so that you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment as you check items off.
“Unnecessary Creating” is a misnomer; it’s very necessary, indeed. Start small. Take notes on ideas you’re excited about and things you’d like to do. Start a Project Queue. Set some time on your calendar. As you experience the benefits of Unnecessary Creating, you will be glad that it’s a part of your rhythm.
Because so much of our time is spoken for by others, whether by your manager, your clients, or your peers, establishing practices that give you a sense of stability and provide a through-line is important and necessary. The practices discussed in this chapter are helpful in that they invest in your future capacity, fuel your creative process, and keep you from feeling like you’re perpetually at the mercy of everyone else’s agenda. By setting rails around your time and being purposeful about idea generation and skill development (through Unnecessary Creating), you are making an investment in future insights in your life and work.
The most common complaint I hear from creatives is “I just don’t have the time.” For 90 percent of us, this is an invalid excuse. I’ve worked with top executives with large families, men and women who sit on the boards of charities and who are very active in their community and are leading major work initiatives, yet they have still found the time to incorporate the capacity-increasing practices described in this chapter. It can—and must—be done. Time is available; you just need to find it. Most of us waste hours weekly that could be used effectively. The phrase “I don’t have time” really means “There are things that are easier/less threatening/more comfortable that I’d rather spend my time on.” If that’s the case, I won’t argue with you, but you need to be honest with yourself about the fact that doing your best work may not be a priority at this point in your life.
9
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: THE CHECKPOINTS .
“Many have gone astray through not understanding how to continue a good beginning.”
—Søren Kierkegaard
Remember that the objective of the methods described in this book is to establish a supporting infrastructure—a rhythm—that will provide stability and increased creative capacity. It will work only if you are diligent and consistent about incorporating the practices into your life. In order to do so effectively, you need to occasionally take a few steps back and think about your current needs.
The purpose of road signs is to keep drivers on the right course. If they appear too frequently, they
simply become noise and are ignored. If they appear too infrequently, they are useless, because drivers are always unsure of whether they’re headed in the right direction. In a similar way, you need to plan checkpoints at specific intervals in your life to ensure that you are still on the right course but not so frequently that so little has changed that you might be tempted to ignore them. These checkpoints help you establish and cultivate the practices discussed in this book in a way that they will facilitate meaningful engagement in your work.
Jeremy Pryor is the founding partner of the video production studio Epipheo, whose clients include Facebook, Google, and Yelp. He told me in an interview that with his very demanding schedule, he’s had to learn to think of his life in terms of buckets, with regular analysis of what’s on the horizon. This is the most effective way he’s found to maintain sanity in the midst of chaos. He sets regular reviews of his rhythms, and whenever something seems awry in his life or work, his first question is “Is this a rhythm problem?”
To stay on course, this kind of rhythm analysis must be both long- and short-term. This is no different from what you probably already do in many areas of your life, though you may never have thought to apply this kind of strategic thinking to your creative process. A little bit of thought and planning time go a long way toward ensuring that you’re not falling into the efficiency trap but are instead focusing on effectiveness.