Mental Mastication Exploration
For the past ten years, when people ask the classic ice-breaker, “so what do you do?” I’ve tended to opt for the simple response, “I work in advertising.” The association they make is that I’m ‘a creative’. Yet, I’ve often qualified that assumption with something that emphasises my natural inclinations towards sales, numbers and the operational side of a business.
Irrespective of my involvement in the ‘traditional’ creative aspects of an ad agency, like design and copywriting, though, creativity is essential when you’re a business owner. Or, for that matter, if you work in client services, project management, healthcare, engineering, and any number of other jobs.
At a time when technology is freeing up our cognitive time by automating routine tasks, it is critical to be a creative thinker — by which I mean connecting things that already exist in new ways. The ability to be able to solve a problem or come up with a novel idea can be considered the unique skill that marks you out amongst your peers.
In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink highlights how the Western workforce is competing with inexpensive overseas labour, automation and technology, increasing demand for products that move beyond function to enhance the meaning of our lives. To respond, he argues, we must develop our ‘right-brain’ skills and to look carefully at what we do and ask ourselves:
1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?
I’ve established my purpose — to create financial freedom for my family by helping people become more effective at work and happier at home through better work-life design. Now I need to work out how to achieve it. To do this, I’ve turned to one of my all-time favourite ‘self-help’ books, A Technique for Producing Ideas (which, for brevity, I’ll refer to as Ideas for the remainder of this article).
Ideas was written in the 1940s by an advertising executive called James Webb Young, who neatly lays out a step-by-step process that can help in the generation of ideas. Young describes the necessity to make ‘new combinations’ and to do so you must ‘gather materials’, some specific and some general:
Specific materials refer to acquiring in-depth knowledge of a subject for which we’re trying to find a solution. In advertising, for example, specific materials are those relating to the product and people to whom you propose to sell it.
General materials relate to the continuous process of consuming information and knowledge about life and events.
To produce something of value from nothing, neither can exist without the other.
I have always been curious about all sorts of subjects, both mainstream and niche, so this gives me great encouragement. Here is my opportunity to use some of the rubbish that I’ve been reading about all these years!
In the future, a successful career will be determined by how well you train your brain to acquire both specific and general knowledge. To operate at a high level of creativity, we must be simultaneously polymathic and focused. In other words, we must use the framework of structured flexibility with our thinking.
The start of this process is to establish a system for collecting and arranging your thoughts. I happen to write every ‘interesting’ thought I have and or any observation from a book or podcast in my phone’s Notes app. Equally, I know people who swear by having a notebook in their pocket at any time or using a tool like Trello to ‘catch’ these thoughts and then apply a Kanban approach to organise them into actionable insights and prioritise.
The ‘capturing’ process is useful for me both during my ‘research’ phase and my ‘mental chewing’ phase to which I’ll come back in a moment. When I’m focusing on specific information, I research a topic in-depth before taking a short break to relax my brain. I then immerse myself for a sustained period (usually between 1.5 and 2.5 hours) and taking advantage of reaching a flow state.
The second stage is to use some prompt cards to write down the individual notes, both specific and general, stacking them into their respective piles. I then draw a card from each stack at random putting them alongside each other to see whether my mind makes any connections between the two. This process can be frustrating since in most cases, you’re not sure what you’re looking for, but this is the point. We’re attempting to make new connections.
Brian Eno, the legendary and ground-breaking musician and producer, uses a similar system, which he calls ‘oblique strategies’ to stimulate ideas amongst his collaborating artists. He has a set of cards, each of which has a word or short phrase on it, frequently something incongruous. The idea is that you try to shift your mind into a different mode of thinking. Obliqueness is a necessity for creative problem-solving. A degree of irrationality contributes to the generation of original thoughts.
The next step is ‘mastication’ of the ideas — literally the (mental) chewing. This part is my favourite, as it demands that you step away from things, separating yourself from the matter at hand and chill the fuck out! What’s the point of this? Well, simply put, your unconscious mind is much better able to make these new connections.
Your brain will naturally come back to the challenge intermittently, providing moments of inspiration that you should, again, note down as they come to you. There are plenty of anecdotes of people having these ideas when showering, driving their car or even when waking in the middle of the night — in other words, when the mind switches off to the rigours of work, often in more of a meditative state.
The final and, arguably, most important task of testing the validity of the ideas, scrutinising them with the help of your friends, family and colleagues.
The principle of Ikigai has helped me identify my purpose and work out what will get me out of bed in the morning.
Ideas has forced me to consider how I can apply my skills to the business challenges we’re going to face in the future. In particular, how to increase people’s capacity for creative thinking and problem-solving in the face of an increasingly complex, uncertain world and how we can harness exponential improvements in technology over the next decade to positively support the way we live and work.
Many now consider data to be the most valuable commodity in the world, yet as technological advances continue apace and automation increasingly replaces people in routine and repetitive tasks, human interaction and communications remain crucial to innovation. Crucially, how we optimise time in our personal and work lives to allow for creativity will be the determinant factor in both producing value for organisations and society, and being happy as individuals.
How does this relate to starting my new business? I’ll consider that further in my next article, which will touch on category creation and the importance of being different.
Further reading:
A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young
A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink
The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler
