Do more work.
The path to doing great work.
I’ll keep this short because people don’t want a lot of words in their blog posts these days. The most important secret to doing great work?
Do a lot of work.
Why? Because it gets you past the ordinary. The expected. The meh. Most creative people who have a few awards and a few years of experience, after a while, tend to feel like they have “figured it out.” That they can come up with great ideas more easily.
No. You can’t. You have not figured out anything. Except how to recycle the same ideas over and over again. You hack. As soon as you think you’ve “figured it out” you are useless.
The truth is, the best ideas come from “figuring it out” anew each time you dive into a creative problem. You have to approach it with the same awe and novelty and abject terror you felt when you first started out in this business.
Google the Einstellung Effect. It’s a pretty interesting mental heuristic — the tendancy for accomplished people to draw upon past experience when solving problems. Which means they therefore think their first solution is the best one. But it almost always isn’t.
Get past your personal Einstellung. Put stuff on the wall and rip it down. Measure one idea against another. Kill the ideas that are just not doing it for you. Become a student of the business so you’re not, consciously or unconsciously, using an idea you’ve seen before. Take the time, get the time, steal the time, buy the time. But put in the work. And generate a ton of ideas.
How many? Well, at least as many ideas as there are words in this blog post (285). Give or take.
Grant Sanders is the CD at Mintz + Hoke, the ad agency that doesn’t do easy, in Avon, CT. He keeps things fresh by filling his head with all kinds of new ideas in the audio books he consumes while commuting 5–6 hours each way from his home on Nantucket Island.
