I started college intending to study psychology. I was fascinated with the mind, how it works, how it perceives surroundings, and how it creates. I quickly realized I was more interested in being creative than studying creativity. I changed my major to art. Now I do both.
One instructor I encountered at Pratt Institute was Emil Dispenza. Emil was a young, rising star among the art director community of New York City. He taught one class a week. I was in it. Emil was fearless, unabashed and wise. His philosophy: If there’s nothing interesting going in, there won’t be anything unique coming out. He demanded we absorb unrelated information constantly exposing ourselves to books, films, music, experiences that did not align with anything else we were doing. I went along with the challenge. I soon had banked all kinds of reference points for comparison. A pattern that applied in one area may trigger a solution in another, unconnected area.
For years, Edward DeBono was a leader in the processes of creative thinking. He perfected several techniques including Lateral Thinking to expand idea generation into new spaces. He encouraged exploration of impractical ideas as you journeyed from problem to solution.
These two men and their audacious approaches to creativity impacted my own approach for generating unique ideas. The first part of the process is to challenge the problem. Is this the real problem? Through critical analysis, it may not be. Or it may simply need to be restated to ignite a creative direction. The next part is to force your brain to identify 50 alternate solutions. The first dozen ideas are obvious. Automatic. Comfortable. The next dozen are off center, illogical or just weird. After that, you’re in the realm of impossible, impractical, unreasonable. That’s where real creativity begins.
In my first ad agency job in Boston, the head art director was a creative genius named Dick Wilkins. He taught me that you can temper an insane idea to get something workable. You cannot take a mediocre idea and make it great. He demonstrated this in meetings with clients. Dick was famous for presenting an idea to a client that was so outrageous, they were relieved when he then presented the tempered version he wanted them to approve. They usually did. Dick was another great inspiration and guide.
All my teachers and all my studies have led me to this conclusion. Creativity is a constant challenge. How you successfully solved a problem yesterday is not the process to solve a problem today. Every creative opportunity demands that you alter your steps, change pace, reverse your perspective, ignore logic and most importantly, value a wrong idea as legitimate steppingstone to a righter right. Judgement and creativity are competing processes. You do one or the other, never both at once.
Aristotle’s logic is the foundation for our education system. If something isn’t right, it’s wrong. Sorry, Aristotle, you get no points for creativity! Between the extremes of right and wrong is an infinite number of possibilities. This is the primordial soup of creative ideas where anything IS possible. It takes courage to challenge logic. But once you get the hang of it, it’s pure freedom. For years, as an art director and creative director, I was constantly selling the invisible to clients. My role was to imagine something never seen before and convince clients it was possible. I had to plant a visual in their imagination so they could also see beyond the obvious or anticipated to accept the unbelievable.
A unique idea is a visualization. To achieve realization, there are countless unforeseen obstacles and plenty of resistance. Perseverance is the path that turns visualization into realization – idea to reality. Perseverance is the path that rejects mediocrity and safety to achieve something truly memorable. Creativity is risky territory. Everything could go wrong. So what? You learn and grow from mistakes. You become more creative with every attempt.
Wisdom from a fortune cookie: You never know until you try…..then you know.
