My most consistent advice for creativity: Your ideas don’t have to come from you
(RIP David Lynch)
This is how I open my D&AD IdeasGym workshop.
“Of all the lies told about creativity, the one about it being a ‘magical process’ is perhaps the most seductive because, although the creative process 𝘪𝘴𝘯'𝘵 magical - you're about to find out how 𝙪𝙣-magical the creative process is - it’s sometimes just easier to tell ourselves it is.
I always start these sessions with a key question – ‘Where do ideas come from?’
Here is one of my favourite creative talking about where 𝘩𝘪𝘴 ideas come from. It’s the film-maker David Lynch…”
[PRESS PLAY AND SOAK UP THE CRACKED LULLABY QUALITY OF HIS VOICE]
Part of my love for the man is not just because, when seeing Wild at Heart for the first time, my mid-teen mind screamed to know what creative genius could have come up with such a vomit of beautiful/disgusting visual brilliance. But also because Lynch is in that relatively small group of creative people that has done a huge service to creative capability bods like me by first deeply analysing his own creative process and then explaining it extensively for others to learn from. (In my experience most people don’t want to dissect their own creative process too deeply out of some sort of superstition- this is not bad or good, it just 𝘪𝘴)
His central thesis - that the world’s best ideas already swim like fish around us out in the world, and we just have to bait our hooks in the right way to catch the best ones - transforms how we think about authorship and creativity, suggesting we are the hosts of ideas which are in many ways more alive than us. The power of that thought is in how it takes the pressure off the creative professional to believe the idea must come from 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯 them. Given that this self-directed pressure is one of the biggest blockers of truly groundbreaking thinking, the value of this insight can’t be underestimated.
I have seen this video hundreds of times but he still keeps me mesmerised every time. And thanks ALWAYS to the brilliant brain of Nick Parish – who first shared this clip with me a decade ago.