Ideas take work.
Creative thinking isn’t magic. It’s far more powerful than that.
There’s a persistent myth about creativity: that ideas are supposed to just pop into our heads. We have expressions like “an idea came to me,” like it just turned up on our doorstep, fully formed, ready to make some magic happen. It turns out a lightbulb isn’t just a hoary old cliche for having an idea. It’s something far more insidious. Because it leads us to believe that ideas should be that instantaneous.
Like turning on a switch.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it makes ideas less valuable.
Over time it’s eroded the time we dedicate to thinking. Because if ideas are things you’re just supposed to have, not make, why do we need more time? It’s also meant that generating ideas is a thing that anyone who works in creativity should be able to do at the drop of a hat. And if you can’t? You must not be creative enough. Talented enough. Good enough.
The real problem is that we’ve all learned to worship the end product.
Because there are so many parts of the process that we can’t see in that final idea. And once you have that idea, how you got there doesn’t seem to matter so much. Nobody wants to hear about everything you tried that didn’t work. All the wrong answers that you came up with to get to the right one. You probably don’t even want to remember all that work yourself. Because you have an idea now.
And a lot of creative work doesn’t look like work, even to ourselves. It’s tough to connect the time your mind spends wandering around a problem with its actual solution.
What about when your subconscious takes over; when your head is just distracted enough to stop trying to force the solution into existence and things just seem to click? Maybe when you’re just about to fall asleep, or you’re in the shower. Isn’t that still work? It’ll never make it onto a timesheet, but it’s where some of our best thinking comes from.
So what if we started thinking of ideas as work?
And I don’t mean make them a drudgery or routine. But simply recognizing all the hidden effort that goes into making something that looks so effortless.
What this really means is something so much bigger than having a great idea. Because if ideas are work, we can work at them. We’re not fated to wait for some muse to whisper something brilliant into our ears. We can go after them ourselves. We can make them better, push them, shape them.
Ideas aren’t what comes to us. They are what we put into them.
We’re capable of brilliant things not because our ideas are brilliant. But because we’ve put the work in to make them that way.
