Better solutions sometimes appear when we stop pushing through the obvious route.
More quotesOgilvy’s sequence begins before the walk or bath: read, investigate, attempt the problem and fill the mind with relevant material.
Before Archimedes climbed in, somebody had filled his head with a problem. That is the missing half of most romantic advice about inspiration.
Load the mind.
Read the customer language. Pull apart the constraints. Make several bad attempts. Get annoyed. Reach the point where conscious effort starts circling the same drain.
Then leave.
Walking, washing up or watching fields slide past a train changes the traffic. Prepared fragments collide without somebody demanding an insight by 3pm. The naming answer appears beside a hedge. Two interviews suddenly reveal the same hidden problem. A simpler technical structure wanders in while the laptop is shut.
None of this rescues laziness. An unfed unconscious has nothing useful to recombine. And the thrilling thought still has to survive evidence, craft and the morning after.
The awkward part is scheduling apparently unproductive time before the answer exists. We happily book analysis because it looks like work. A walk looks suspiciously like a walk. So more inputs keep arriving after the mind has lost the ability to select among them.
Incubation is not mystical. It is permission for association to become less obedient. The useful collision may join a customer complaint to a pricing mechanic, or an old story to a new interface. Forced originality tends to produce novelty-shaped sludge because everybody is staring at the same prompt with the same strained face.
Ogilvy’s claret is colourful period detail. A long walk is easier to defend before lunch.
Preparation supplies the material. Time away changes which pieces meet. When attention returns, the connection still has to answer the brief, survive contact with the budget and make sense to somebody who was not in the bath.