Where ideas actually come from

The romantic account of creativity, where an idea arrives complete while you are doing something else, describes the last five percent of a process and hides the rest.

New ideas are almost always combinations of old ones. Somebody who has read widely, worked in two industries, or learned an unrelated skill has more pieces to combine, and more pieces is most of what creative capacity is. This is good news, because collecting material is something anybody can do deliberately.

Volume produces quality. People who generate many ideas produce more good ones, and not because a higher proportion are good. They produce more of everything. The instinct to wait until you have a good idea before writing any down is exactly backwards.

Constraints help. A blank page is paralysing and a brief with limits is workable. "Design something" is harder than "design a poster, two colours, no photographs, readable from five metres". Professionals often add constraints deliberately when none exist.

Ideas come when the mind is loose, which is why walking, showering and the moment before sleep are where people report them. That is not where the work happened; it is where the work surfaced after you stopped pushing at it.

Which gives the actual method. Load the problem deliberately, work at it hard enough to get stuck, then step away and do something undemanding. The stepping away only works after the loading.