How to Come Up with Good Ideas

The author in New Orleans with one of his creative muses, the indomitable Ignatius J. Reilly.

I will never tell a story at the level of Wright Thompson, but we do have one thing in common—we both find the brainstorm meeting completely absurd. “Everybody is looking for ideas all the time, like breathing, or they are not doing it at all,” Thompson said in our recent conversation. “If you have to come in at a set time to come up with ideas, I don’t want to be anywhere near you.”

It’s true. The people who are good at coming up with ideas don’t turn it on and off for work. What they create comes from the accidental byproduct of living their lives. 

So if you want to know everything about everything, but can struggle all week to dream up a single promising pitch, how do you get to that point?

Ideas Breed Ideas 

One starting point is simply coming up with a lot of concepts, notions, musings, and others thoughts that can lead to something creatively worthwhile. A few years ago I interviewed Bob Mankoff, then the cartoon editor of The New Yorker. Given that the role sounded whimsical, I expected Mankoff to be a bit goofy. But he was all business when it came to generating ideas. Each week, he required anyone submitting cartoon pitches to The New Yorker to deliver at least 10 concepts. Why? Because nine of our 10 things in life don’t work out.

Mankoff was always amazed when people came to him and said they had one great idea. One idea is never enough, and it’s rarely good. “Ideas breed ideas,”Mankoff emphasized. “The way you get good ideas is to get a lot of ideas.” 

What do you do then with the rejected ideas? You learn from them. One, about the craft and what you need to improve on for the next round. Two, about how to be resilient because resilience is key to succeeding in a competitive, creative enterprise. 

A Powder Keg of Creative Inspiration

Like training for a marathon, generating ideas is all about consistency over time. We often think in the 10,000 hours timeframe, but architect Peter Marino has told Malcolm Gladwell to hold his beer and stretches our thinking on what it takes to really master something. 

Marino is a go-to designer for fashion houses, like Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior.  I once visited him in his Midtown Manhattan office where he was dressed in his office uniform of leather from head-to-toe, including a vest on a frigid winter evening. He is a human powder keg of creative inspiration now. But that wasn’t always the case. “Now that I’ve done more than 100,000 hours of design, ideas come in a nanosecond,” he said. “I used to struggle for days to come up with an idea, but now if it takes me 20 seconds I feel like I’m getting slow.” 

One pivotal skill Marino developed along the way was how to get clients to buy into his ideas faster. He initially tried using verbal words to describe something, but realized those aren’t terribly effective in his line of work. “Someone will say ‘I love celery green’ and I’ll show them four greens, all of which are celery greens, and they’ll go, ‘No, that’s not what I like.’ Then they’ll show me a green that is robin’s egg blue.” Instead, he leans on his background in sculpture and begins by touching materials so he can determine what to use to evoke the feelings and emotions of the project, then works out from there. 

The same can be true for you: Creating is by no means a linear process. You can find a way into your work by starting with a problem to solve, or beginning at the end, or whatever direction best suits your approach. My practice is to dump everything in my head on paper for the first draft—no editing, no second guessing, no breaks. Throw it all  into the story, then I go back later and cut, refine, and sharpen the jumble of words into something that gets the point across.

Your Worldview is a Competitive Moat

If you’re earlier in your career and the 100,000-hour mark feels eons away, it is daunting to think about how far you have to go to reach the level of a Peter Marino. But you’re not without options. As much as you want to generate as many ideas as you can early on, what you’re really aiming to do over time is to develop your worldview. How you see the world is the lens that will allow you to take all of the thoughts floating in your head and make sense of them. 

One of the most prolific idea generators I’ve ever come across is the late Sara Little Turnbull,  a design pioneer whose accomplishments were broad and ranged from the first pre-made bows for 3M; Bugles snacks, Bacos, and cake mixes for General Mills; and the glass cooktop for Corning, to name only a few. Most notably, she was the creative force behind the N95 face mask—it emerged from work she was doing for 3M inventing a new kind of bra cup. Turnbull, who had family in the hospital at the time, cleverly figured out how to flip the bra cup over and use it to filter particles over the mouth. 

Turnbull’s intense curiosity led her to read five newspapers a day, though not necessarily for the day-to-day particulars. “I wasn’t reading the news, I was reading about change,” she says in A Life by Design. By looking at the world as a place of ongoing transformation, Turnbull spotted shifts in culture, society, and business, and designed for the inflection points where they all met.

By connecting unlikely dots, she made order out of the chaos and her breakthroughs resulted from going out in the world and talking to people, linking unlikely ideas together, and applying human intuition—like flipping a bra cup into a surgical mask. Turnbull knew there is serendipity in the creative process, and she allowed room for it.

Celebrate the Mistakes

The ability to generate ideas is mostly in your control—you can determine how many reps you take, the amount of time you put in, and the effort needed to look at the world from different perspectives. You can even control your mistakes, says Joana Astolfi, founder and designer at Studio Astolfi in Portugal. 

Hermès is Astolfi’s biggest client and her studio has designed the windows for the brand’s Lisbon shop for the past seven years. “The more Hermès respects your work, the more they push you,” said Astolfi. “Every year, the big challenge has been to continuously surpass and surprise myself.” For one vitrine display, Astolfi reimagined 800 vintage books as a complex underwater scene complete with a papier maché octopus. “A lot of experimentation and trial and error took place here,” she said. “We had to re-do some of the vitrines until we achieved the desired effect, but it was worth the time as the final result was very striking, poetic and meticulously crafted.” 

Astolfi’s takeaway? “A lot of things happen during the creative process, and things go wrong sometimes, especially if you're using mechanisms that are more complex,” she says. “When errors happen, I'm all about celebrating the beauty of the mistake. The mistake can open the door to a path that reaches the final result.”

So embrace ideas that don’t work out on the first go and see if you can bend them into something new and unexpected. Strive to be a curious citizen of the world. Ask the questions no one else does. Learn why people do things differently than you. Look in the opposite direction of the crowds. And collect as much material from your life experiences as you can, so it can feed your thinking. When you can’t turn off your ideas brain, you’ll know you’re on to something. “The people I admire don’t ever turn it off,” says Thompson. “Because it can’t be turned off.” 

If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.