Where Ideas Come From & How to Make Them Arrive More Easily

Perhaps you’ve heard of an eccentric – even daft – design icon named George Lois.  As the story goes, during a presentation one day, he stood in the window of a NYC high-rise and threatened to jump unless the client bought his idea.

Crazed or not, his writings share a wonderful insight on where ideas come from.  They don’t come from heaven, he said.  (I may not entirely agree with that viewpoint.)  Nevertheless, he went on to say something with which I do whole-heartedly agree.

He stated, “It may seem like ideas come from out of the blue, but it’s all from life experience, from your understanding of the world around you, of history, or art, of sports.  You have to have a real sense of what the hell’s going on in the world and in the culture.”

I once worked for a brilliant advertising man by the name of Hal Newsom who told me that to be a truly creative person I should always think of my mind as a computer.  “It’s being fed information constantly,” he noted.  “Don’t put the intake button in neutral and most importantly, don’t ever push the OFF button.”

You can’t get out of your brain what isn’t in there.  Having a vast breadth of experiences and knowledge is fundamental to idea creation.  Providing yourself with “quiet time and space” is a key that unlocks that library during the ideation process.

A recent issue of One magazine, referenced studies done at Northwestern University that concluded if you focus too intensely on a problem, you tend to get stuck in the more logical left hemisphere of your brain.  But as you relax, “The cortex is freed up to conduct a more far-reaching search through the right hemisphere.  What it’s looking for are remote associations that can help solve the problem in unusual and perhaps illogical ways.”

According to Mark Jung-Beeman, the professor who conducted that research, “when a serendipitous connection is made, the insight suddenly becomes clear.”

It’s time to take a long shower, or a stroll around the park.

Image courtesy of here.