How to get ideas? Part II.

In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas.

Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and methods are everything. 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 all ideas are produced and how to grasp the princinples which are at the source of all ideas.

Two Principles

There are two important principles which underlie the production of ideas. The first is that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements. The second principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see 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 relationship and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.

The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationship between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas. Now this habit can undoubtedly be cultivated.

Ideas are new combinations of old elements

The technique of the mind follows five steps. The important thing is to recognize their relationship and to grasp the fact that the mind follows these five steps in definite order - that by no possibility can one of them be taken before the preceding one is completed, if an idea is to be produced.

The first step of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material. 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 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.

The material which must be gathered are of two kinds: they are specific and they are general. In advertising, the specific materials are those relating to the product and the people to whom you purpose to sell it. We constantly talk about the importance of having an intimate knowledge of the product and the consumer, but in fact we seldom work on it.

This, I suppose, is because a real knowledge of a product, and of people in relation to it, is not easy to come by. Getting it is something like the process which we recommended to De Maupassant as the way to learn to write. "Go out into the streets of Paris," he was told by an older writer, "and pick out a cab driver. He will look to you very much like every other cab driver. But study him until you can describe him so that he is seen in your description to be an individual, different from every other cab driver in the world."

This is the real meaning of that trite talk about getting an intimate knowledge of a product and its consumers. Most of us stop too soon in the process of getting it. If the surface differences are not striking we assume that there are no differences. But if we go deeply enough, or far enough, we nearly always find that between every product and some consumers there is an individuality of relationship which may lead to an idea.

Of equal importance with the gathering of these specific materials is the continuous process of gathering general materials.

Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever know has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested - from, say, Egypyian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was 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.

Now this gathering of general materials is important because this is where the previously stated principle comes in - namely, that an idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of elements. In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events.

The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope, as you know, is an instrument which designers sometimes use in searching for new patterns. It has little pieces of colored glass in it, and when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical designs. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.

So it is with the production of ideas for advertising - or anythong else. The construction of an advertisement is the construction of a new pattern in this kaleidoscopic world in which we live. The more of the elements of that world which are stored away in that pattern-making machine, the mind, the more the chances are increased for the production of new and striking combinations, or ideas.

This, then, is the first step in the technique of producing ideas: the gathering of materials. Part of it, you will see, is a current job and part of it is a lief-long job. Before passing on to the next step there are two practical suggestions I might make about this material-gathering process.

The first is that if you have any sizable job of specific material gathering to do it is useful to learn the card-index method of doing it. The second suggestion is that for storing up certain kinds of general material some method of doing it like a scrapbook or file is useful.

The mental digestive process

Now it comes the process of masticating these gathered materials, as you would food that you are preparing for digestion.

This part of the process is harder to describe in concrete terms because it goes on entirely inside your head. 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.

In this third stage you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can. 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.

Constantly thinking about it

1. The gathering of raw materials

2. The working over of these materials in your mind

3. the incubating stage

4. the actual birth of the idea

5. the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness.

References:

[1] Veblen, Theory of the Leisure class

[2] Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

[3] Graham Wallas, the art of thought

[4] H. Poincare, Science and method

[5] W.I.B Beveridge, the art of scientific investigation