a technique for producing ideas
the book
This 1965 manual is aimed at advertising copywriters but can apply to any field where new ideas are required. It's very short, written in a slightly old school manner but contains some useful ways of thinking about idea generation.
A Could Read
why I read the book
The book was cheap, short and positively reviewed. I'm interested in creativity, particularly combinational creativity and sometimes struggle to think of new ideas that I want to pursue. As I was reviewing how I might go about morning journalling, a habit I've found very effective, I thought I could incorporate some simple idea generation into the mix. The book didn't take long to read and gave me a few useful notes that may become part of something else down the track. It was a very low risk bet.
ideas and quotes
the process
Gather Raw Material
Work Over Raw Material in Your Mind
Let It Incubate
Birth The Idea
Making an Idea Practical
This isn't exactly a revolutionary process but you can often see with yourself how these steps happen. The 4th stage is commonly experienced in the shower or out running with a famous instance being the Isaac Newton apple from a tree observation while he was strolling in the garden. You've gathered some information, considered it, forgotten about it, then somehow have alighted on a conclusion or formed idea that then needs to be confirmed through testing.
Pareto says you're either speculator or rentier
The speculator is constantly pre-occupied with the possibilities of new combinations. The rentier is a routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving person, whom the speculator manipulates.
Young says that creativity requires reconstruction and that if you're an ideas person, you're a reconstructer; if you find advertising interesting you're 'among the reconstructors of this world.' According to him, the best creatives have two things in common:
First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested [...] Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.
Young later expands on this, saying that while you should gather as much varied material as you can, it’s best that you gather through genuine interest, ‘when you’re pursuing it as an end in itself.’ If you find something truly interesting, you’ll have a greater understanding of it, as well as a stronger emotional response to it that will help you connect it to something else. Inevitably time will help you with this gathering process if you live openly to experience.
You never know where an insight may come from and so to be widely interested is to open yourself up to inspiration and to be able to connect ideas from disparate spaces.
principles then method
In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles; and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas.
True of learning any endeavour. Elon Musk works from First Principles. What if we didn't know what we think we know about this. Assume there was no existing way of doing this. How would we solve the problem?
It's similar in physical activity too. Learn the principle of what you want to do, then apply a method. Here the same applies, the existing way may not be the best way - think the Fosbury Flop completely reinventing the sport of high jump.
Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up, of what President Hutchins has called rapidly aging facts. Principle and method are everything.
For knowledge you could also read deeds. What you did today will become something that happened yesterday, then something that happened once, then something everyone has forgotten. Very few deeds ring through history. Clinging to specific knowledge or past deeds means you're doomed to be surpassed.
This is a bit of a problem for me. I've built an amazing notes database that has proven useful time after time, yet I keep some of my 'big' ideas back, thinking I'll do justice to them one day. Then when current events strike, I've realised that my unfinished work would suddenly be timely, the only issue being that it doesn't currently exist as I was waiting for more information to round it off with.
the Simpsons already did it
There’s an episode of South Park where Butters (as his Professor Chaos alter ego) thinks up a series of schemes to take over the world, but is thwarted each time as they’ve all been done on the Simpsons already. It speaks to a universal truth about storytelling and ideas:
an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
Everything has already been made. It’s the narrative thrust of postmodernism, Baudrillard's simulacra. The copy of the copy of the copy. We've done everything that can be done. All elements exist so to create the new requires combining the currently existing. Modernism went from the Ezra Pound declaration at the beginning of the 20th century to ‘make it new’ to the current Virgil Abloh take something that exists and make it 3% different.
Rather than see facts as separate from each other, Young stresses the need to search for relationships.
To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge, To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.
Once you're seeing where knowledge can link with other knowledge, you're on the path to creating something new by combining something that no one has previously combined. To Young's mind,
A search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.
Sometimes a word can in itself, be an idea. Think how many meanings one word can convey.
Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn’t get the hang of the story, simply missed the point that it is a collection of short stories.
So collecting ideas in the form of knowledge or even individual words and searching for the relationships between them is the way to find a new combination. The final point on this goes back to South Park:
Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious. When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.
Butters tests his ideas in the world and finds out that they've already been done. He snaps but later realises with the help of Chef that The Simpsons borrowed their ideas from elsewhere too. You need to combine enough old things to make something new and accept that true originality is impossible. It might be that your solution will come from sharing your idea, finding out its limitations but also its possibilities.
simple but not easy
the production of ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.
How often do you get excited by a shiny new tool? I got a flash digital notepad that would sync with my devices, enabling me to write notes freehand and have them appear in Evernote. I've never used it. Instead I use my basic Apple Notes app and actual paper notebooks. The tools don't matter.
His opening and closing remarks follow this line of reasoning.
the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it [...] while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it.
Simple doesn't mean easy. It's simple to accept that you need to do something hard to get where you want, whether that's running a marathon, writing a book or coming up with a valid business idea. It's another thing to sit there and do the work.
RELATED IDEAS
The Simpsons Already Did It - Here's the full South Park episode. I love Professor Chaos.
First Principles Thinking - Explanation of this method from Farnham Street. It's what Elon Musk espouses and is the basis for Tesla and SpaceX, two companies that have reinvented industries that were previously thought unassailable.
Range - I bang on about this book a lot, but it's so good. It's about why you should not only cultivate range in yourself, you should also cultivate range in your life and influences. For the purposes of creation, you can see why this would be beneficial.