A Technique for Producing Ideas – the simple five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!

COMBINING OLD ELEMENTS
With regard to the general principles which underlie the productions of ideas, it seems to me that there are two which are important.

Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.

But after a while you will reach the hopeless stage

the first stage you have gathered your

You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light

food. In the second you have masticated it well. Now the digestive process is on. Let it alone-but stimulate the flow of gastric juices.

The point is, of course, that when relationships of this kind are seen they lead to the extraction of a general principle This general principle when grasped, suggests the key to a new application, a new combination, and the result is an idea.

Consequently, the habit of mind which leads to a. search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas. Now this habit of mind can undoubtedly be cultivated.

The materials which must be gathered are of two kinds: they are specific and they are general

Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested-from, say, Egyptian burial customs to Modern Art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: browsing, no milk