A good talk I heard today, on ‘differentiating yourself/your business’, from The Appman, reminded me of a couple of really important tips. These are things I do every day: they’re so simple, but really useful in holding onto/developing good creative ideas:
1. Always keep a pad and pen by your bedside. Invariably, you have little control over when a gem of an idea will strike. If your brain works anything like mine, 3am seems – annoyingly – to be the golden hour for that flash of inspiration.
So, wake up, furiously jot down your idea, get it out of your head, sleep peacefully…. then wake up again, when it’s light, to a page of utter drivel or a world-beating solution to a problem.
2. ‘Kill your darlings’ (as the saying goes), but not all of them. Make sure you ‘bottom drawer’ – literally or metaphorically – some of your ideas that appear to be really good, but don’t quite fit what you’re working on at the time.
Good ideas can often be fairly generic and, therefore, malleable – so what you cast aside one day may well prove the ideal fit for another brief/problem, six months down the line.
At that point, you can either bask in the glory of a ‘brilliant new idea’ that ‘just seemed to come from nowhere’…. or admit that you’ve just rehashed something from a wee while ago. Ultimately, if the idea now works much better, for a different brief, who really cares??
Or, to put it all another way: I’m more interesting in my sleep and I’m only ever original by accident. Happy days.
