The Art of Producing Ideas
A 1939 guide that outlines the five essential steps for a creative process
Welcome to Morning Pages, a newsletter sharing inspirations to help you cultivate creativity and fulfillment.
Hi friends,
For the past two weeks, I’ve been making things by hand, from tumbling rocks, etching glass, making jewelry, to carving block prints. I am eager to play with different materials and explore different ideas in the next two months.
Speaking of ideas, I would like to share with you an intriguing old book written by James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas.
James Webb Young was a driving force behind the creation of the modern advertising industry. He was one of advertising's most honored educators and practitioners. Young stated that, as with any creative work, you need to start by understanding the relevant principles and methods.
What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are the source of all ideas.
He referenced Vilfredo Pareto’s quote:
An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
In other words, there is nothing new under the sun. As Steve Jobs said “creativity is just connecting things”, searching for relationships between seemingly unrelated facts is one of the highest importance in producing ideas.
His book “A Technique for Producing Ideas” lays out the five essential steps for a creative process. The formula is so incredibly simple that Young called out that following through the formula requires the hardest kind of intellectual work.
Stage 1: Gathering Raw Material
Young talked about the importance of building a rich pool of raw material — mental resources from which to build new combinations.
Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we dodge the preceding steps.
Young insisted that the future belongs to those who are curious.
Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics.
First, there was no subject under the sun in which they could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for them.
Second, they were an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.
Stage 2: Digesting the Material
This second stage is about synthesizing raw information and making connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. This notion of the creative process affirms Paola Antonelli’s brilliant metaphor of “the curious octopus” in her 2010 talk.
What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.
Stage 3: Unconscious Processing
Young stresses the importance of making absolutely “no effort of a direct nature”.
It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.
Stage 4: The Light-bulb Moment
Then and only then, Young promises, everything will click in the fourth stage of the serendipitous light-bulb moment.
Out of nowhere the idea will appear. It will come to you when you are least expecting it — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.
Stage 5: Idea Meets Reality
Young calls the last stage “the cold, gray dawn of the morning after,” when your newborn idea has to face reality:
It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world.
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.
For me personally, Young’s formula is a great reminder that creativity needs open space to flourish. When we reach this third stage of ideation, it helps to step away from the problem and turn to whatever stimulates our imagination. Listen to music, immerse in nature, read poetry, or do nothing.
When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
— Alan Watts
What are your favorite methods for producing ideas? I’d love to hear from you.
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