Measure, Audit, Boost Your Ideas

Where Does Your Inspiration Strike?

Don’t say the shower. Everyone says the shower.

You know the feeling, whether you’ve been in bank marketing, or a different industry. You’re in a meeting. Possibly a boardroom, possibly a cross-department meeting, or maybe it’s with one of your clients. In my case, that could be a zoom meeting with regional department heads, in others, it could be a marketing advisory board.
You’ll notice the room swirling, as a suddenly obvious problem emerges. Maybe not enough people are buying a roboadvisor tool. Maybe it’s a mortgage loan product that is actually inscrutable. Maybe it’s a widget, a scrub daddy with a sickly chartreuse shade. (I’ll stick with the banking examples because I’ve lived them.)

The principals of the meeting align on a course of action, a result or outcome that needs to be achieved. How to do it? Well, that’s the tough part. And that’s when the room looks toward you. They need an idea. Something that sizzles. Something that works. It has to be catchy right there. That is the moment. That’s your moment, Mr. Marketing Director. You’re the creative one!

Except you know as well as I do: Creativity doesn’t work like that. Rare is the meeting when you have an idea that bursts from nothing. When it happens, sure, it’s brilliant. In reality, when a skilled marketing executive has an idea in their hip pocket, it’s almost always a result of careful planning, collaboration, and commitment to the creative process. Most important, a commitment to your creative process.

This is true whether you’re a solo practitioner or an in-house brand leader. The best marketers earn a reputation of having back pocket ideas, or conjuring a sticky name from nothing, or immediately articulating the problem to solve. (Other tips, other posts: Let silence breathe. Repeat lines back to the principals.)

However, that only occurs when the practitioner harnesses their creative power. And to do this, you’ve got to plan ahead. You’ve got to practice. And you’ve got to be meticulous, honest with yourself, and audit your own mind.

How far ahead? Unclear. How much practice. Also unclear. How meticulous? Uh, let’s say, “very.” How honest? Brutally.

The best way to determine your practice, collaboration, and planning schedule is to audit your mind and take stock of your own creative habits. You cannot always force a timeline, but you can force your brain to train itself toward creative solutions. Where do your ideas start? Stephen King used to say, Utica, N.Y., because he thought this was a bullshit question. Most of the world says, ‘the shower.’ For me, personally, my ideas occur in a few places, and almost without fail when I’m in motion. They are:

1. When I run.
2. When I strum the guitar.
3. When I mow the lawn.
4. When I listen to music.
5. When I putter back and forth, my bedroom to my kitchen, completing idiotic tasks before bed. Think: setting coffee timer, starting dishwasher, flossing, feeding my cats.
   

That’s realistically it. Beyond those times, my right-brain is pretty much only good for Simpsons quotes and Pearl Jam lyrics.

How did I figure this out, you ask? Simple. I got one brilliant idea, one time. It was a toaster-themed promotion, and I was mowing the lawn, listening to a podcast. Soon it was an actual ad campaign, plus my easiest sell as a bank marketer. So I started thinking: How could I replicate this idea?

I started writing down any ideas. I tried all sorts of different notebooks (Ranking coming soon, different post, different time). I filled these pages with ideas. “Office baseball vendors” was one terrible idea. (I wanted a hot dog.) “Annoying Fee TV Campaign” is another good one. (I paid an ATM fee.)

I started to learn about myself. I wrote down a lot more nonsense after physical activity, or during guitar sessions. Idea scribbles covered two pages, then a notebook, then another notebook, and then it was time to hunt for that super awesome notebook that would solve everything.

And occasionally I found a nugget of a great idea in the midst of a bunch of half-baked kernels.

But once I felt my creative blood flowing after any of these activities, I started doing them all the time. All the time. I ran more. I took more guitar lessons, I bought an iPhone with the-most memory to hold 500-plus Pearl Jam bootlegs. I lugged a Bluetooth speaker wherever I traveled.

It took me more than 10 years. But now, when I’m in a meeting and a surprise moment is needed, I know enough to either deflect until I have a chance to collaborate (soft political skill), or I’ve jotted enough mindless ideas that I actually have one simmering at the ready. (Actual creative skill).

When you’ve been in one place long enough, or with one client long enough, you occasionally have the option to lob out nonsense that provokes thinking. This is rare. In reality, to put forth acceptable creative ideas, you need to be growing the ideas all the time. Prune them as needed,. Every so often you’ll produce something that flowers.

This isn’t rocket science and I’m not a revolutionary. The takeaway is simply to review your own habits. Start measuring and monitoring everything, not unlike logging calories to determine when and how to eat better. At worst, you’ll begin to more fully know your own brain. And when you start learning when to really flex the brain, and when to give it the right cues, you’ll suddenly realize a boost in your limits. And an increase to your idea output. And maybe something big. That’s the secret of creativity.

So it starts with you. Grab a pencil, grab a notebook, and go ahead, take a shower. (At least you can possibly rule it out?)