stop looking. this is not a blog post on romance (although the advice for romantic relationships is probably the same). it’s actually about how to generate great ideas and great ideas come from combining what seems like disparate things to form something new, fresh, and seemingly original. in his groundbreaking book, a technique for producing ideas, james webb argues that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of elements.” in order to piece together those elements one must search for previously unidentified relationships and associations.
what’s counterintuitive is that searching for those relationships is often best done after we gather all of the information we can, “chew on it,” and then stop thinking about the challenge and allow our subconscious to do the work. doing this allows us to tap into a greater processing and storage capability. i imagine it is similar to how we work with our computers.
have you every created a folder on your desktop to access files that you need frequently? that’s what it’s like when we directly focus on the task at hand – we are only working with the files we have stored for quick access. however, when we go play video games, go to a movie, listen to music, or read a book, we allow our minds to tap into the rich history of memories, knowledge, and other things that may help us solve the problem but are not readily stored in our “quick access files.”
doing something else besides being consumed with the problem may feel wrong but, lucky for us, our brain actually never stops working on the problem. this is why we have that magical “eureka” moment where we believe that our great idea came out of thin air. it didn’t. we were working it over the entire time – searching for new combinations and relationships in the back of our mind. the reality is, we just didn’t know it.
so next time you have a huge marketing problem or personal problem to solve, don’t be afraid to daydream. you never know what you might come up with.
