The Creative Secret All Great Writers Know About

And how it can increase your IQ.

Let me start off by saying that you can write incredibly interesting articles and look very, very smart if you just follow a few simple steps.

And this quick story holds the clue to cracking the secret sauce:

Dan Cobley, the marketing director at Google, has a riveting TED talk to his name where he speaks about the two passions of his life: marketing and physics. He takes the basic rules of Physics and then shows you a scenario in marketing where the rule works.

You might remember this simple Physics equation from school:

Force = mass x acceleration

Rearranging it, you get acceleration = force / mass.

This means that for a larger mass, you’ll need more force to reach a particular rate of acceleration or change its direction. Pretty simple.

And Dan explains that it’s the same with brands. He says,

‘The more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning.’

He goes on to explain that this is why companies like Unilever and P&G keep brands separate instead of having one giant parent brand.

The Secret Sauce

Now we’ve all learnt this basic equation, and most of us know that large companies have separate brands instead of just one identity because it’s easier to manage. But none of us put those two things together to create something unique.

This ability to make connections is the key to creativity and it’s very powerful.

Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Steve jobs, Sigmund Freud, George Orwell and countless others who have contributed significantly to science, mathematics, art, literature, poetry, psychology, technology and more all have this ability to make connections in common.

Have you always wanted to write amazing, original posts that will take the world by storm? If you’re lucky, you might find one novel idea in your life that no one’s ever written about. And that’s not nearly enough to start a blog and keep it running. Plus you can’t wait around forever for the idea to strike.

The secret sauce behind the perfect writing recipe is finding intelligent links between seemingly different ideas or objects.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famous paleontologist, tells people that he’s an exceptional essayist because he hardly forgets anything he reads and can see connections between them all.

Something, he says, not everyone can do.

I don’t think that’s true. It’s not that we can’t, it’s just that we don’t.

A lot of us don’t take the time and effort to cultivate this very important skill that will actually make us smarter. Which is a shame because it’s not that difficult to do.

So How Can I Make Connections While I Write?

If you want to know how to make connections like a genius and write epic shit, this is how you do it.

(Sorry, about the two-part post. Clubbing them together would have made the post too long and I would have ended up adding a TL;DR anyway.)

Once again, if you liked this post you can find the 7 steps to writing more intelligent content by making connections here. Thanks for reading!