Fueling our ability to stay creative and generate new ideas.
Written by Maxx Burman | Illustrations by Érik Guarisco
We all know the feeling of being uninspired. We have the time, the tools, and the ability to make something great, but we sit down to work and nothing comes. The page stays blank, the canvas stays empty, and every idea feels like something we have already seen before.
When I was working as a professional artist, I did not have the luxury of waiting for inspiration. I was painting every day, often for weeks at a time, and whatever the client needed that day was what I had to figure out how to make. So it was on me to continue fueling my creativity.
Between projects, I traveled to new countries. When I was home, I was constantly going to galleries and art shows. While I worked, I listened to audiobooks and filled my head with stories.
When I felt creatively full, ideas came more easily and the work was better. When I spent too long doing nothing but producing, I eventually started running out of good ideas to produce.
We often talk about inspiration as though it is something that happens to us. Some days we have it, some days we do not, and when it disappears we assume we have to wait for it to come back. I do not think that is true.
We can actively put ourselves in situations that make inspiration more likely. We can change what we expose ourselves to, create space for our minds to wander, and seek out experiences that give us new material to work with.
Staying inspired cannot be something we leave to chance. It has to become part of the job.
For most of history, execution was the expensive part. We could have an idea for a film, a product, or a business, but the ability to execute them was rare. We learned to treat ideas as almost worthless and put a lot of value on the people who could actually make them real.
Technology has been steadily lowering the barriers between having an idea and making it real. Computers entered our homes, the internet gave us ways to learn almost anything from anywhere, and today, most of us carry a camera, an editing suite, and a publishing platform in our pocket.
As those barriers fall, the ability to execute becomes less scarce. That shifts more of the value toward the quality of the idea being executed.
I can see that shift clearly in the illustrations for these essays. I hire an illustrator for each one, but I am not hiring them because they make beautiful images. We have no shortage of ways to make beautiful images now. I hire them because they can read an essay, understand the idea underneath it, and find an unexpected way to visualize it.
Sometimes they come back with a metaphor I would never have considered. Other times, they find a visual that makes the argument clearer than the words did on their own. The finished image still matters, but a meaningful part of the value was created before they ever started drawing.
We are entering a period where we can make more than we have good ideas for. Execution still matters, but as it becomes easier to turn an idea into something real, more of the value shifts toward having an idea worth executing in the first place.
If having a good idea is becoming more valuable, then generating those ideas has to become a more deliberate part of the work. That starts with understanding how creative thinking actually happens, and the different kinds of mental activity that help us generate and develop ideas.
One is focused and directed. We have a specific problem in front of us, and we work through the possibilities we already know. If we are trying to make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we might systematically test different kinds of jelly until we find the one we like best.
The other is more open and associative. Instead of searching within a narrow set of known solutions, our minds are free to wander between memories, experiences, and ideas that would not normally sit beside one another. Maybe we see the banana on the counter, connect it to the sandwich we're making, and suddenly peanut butter and banana becomes an option we were not even searching for.
We then return to focused thinking to figure out how to make that new idea work. How thick should we slice the bananas? What's the right ratio of peanut butter to banana? Would a little honey make it even better?
Understanding these different ways of thinking gives us a way to take a more active role in finding inspiration. We can deliberately step away from the problem, expose ourselves to unfamiliar experiences, and give our minds the freedom to make unexpected connections.
We cannot guarantee when a new idea will emerge, but we can create the conditions that make it more likely.
In 2016, I was working as an Art Director at a title design studio. Every project began with a pitch, where we would spend a week or two developing a few ideas and creating enough imagery to show the client what each one could become.
The client would compare our concepts against several other studios and hire the one they liked best. Everyone we competed against could execute at a high level, so the quality of the idea often became the deciding factor.
Because original ideas were what we competed on, we went out of our way to find inspiration outside our industry. If we were designing opening titles for a television show, we did not just look at other title sequences. We looked at sculpture, photography, and fine art, pulling references from outside the medium in hopes of finding connections that had not already been made.
There is a great art bookstore in Culver City called Arcana Books. We would go there at the start of a project, spend hours wandering the shelves, and each bring a book back to the studio to scan the images that caught our attention. The point was not that books were better than the internet. The point was that we were deliberately looking somewhere different.
You can see that clearly in our work. The opening titles for Westworld were influenced by the anatomical forms of Body Worlds and the work of Damien Hirst. The Crown combined Renaissance still lifes with macro photography. When Justin Lin directed Star Trek Beyond, we studied automotive photography to shape the way we presented the USS Enterprise.
If we only look inside our own field, we are usually working with the same inputs as everyone else. Designers study other designers, filmmakers study other filmmakers, and entrepreneurs study other businesses. The more we limit ourselves to what is already familiar, the harder it becomes to find something original.
Part of the creative person's job is deliberately seeking inspiration where others aren't looking.
There is an irony in where creative work is heading.
When execution was the bottleneck, we were rewarded for the more mechanical parts of creativity: being precise, efficient, and consistent. We celebrated people for mastering tools, refining techniques, and being able to produce on command.
As technology makes execution easier, more of our creative value comes from our ability to generate original ideas. And those ideas depend on our ability to find inspiration in the world around us.
That means getting better at our craft requires us to look beyond our craft. The richer and more varied our experiences become, the more material we have to draw from. Every new curiosity, unexpected encounter, and unfamiliar experience has the potential to shape our inspiration and influence the ideas we bring into the world.
In this new era of creativity, our value comes less from how precisely we execute and more from how interesting we become as human beings.