The most creative people you know have a secret
You know that spark of inspiration that feels somewhat magical and random, like an idea just came to you from the universe? It's actually a simple system you can control.
You know that spark of inspiration that feels somewhat magical, like an idea just came to you from the universe? It is in fact a bit magical, but more practical to achieve (and more regularly) than all the books and interviews with creative geniuses might make it seem. I call it your secret repertoire.
Your secret repertoire is an accumulation of everything you’ve seen and experienced, distilled down to its essence: specific books, films, art, poetry, designs, music. Maybe a beautiful object that spoke to you, a line of dialogue you overheard, a moment you witnessed between strangers on the train. It’s the little fragments of inspiration that eventually lead to unexpected connections in your head, resulting in an original idea. Little sparks of meaning collected together and boiled down to that magical “aha” moment.
Think of it as the engine driving your creative work.
The engine runs on experience and observation. The more you experience – and pay attention to your experience – the better it runs, and the more ideas that come to you. You only have to feed the engine and then let it work for you. Intentionally collect the little things that inspire you or make you feel something. Take a screenshot and tuck it away somewhere. Highlight that passage in the book you’re reading. Feed it all into your engine and let it run.
It doesn’t really matter what you use to build your repertoire. Could be an an app or a shoebox under your bed, or a combination of things. It’s just a place to intentionally collect the things that inspire you before you forget them. Some of these things just stick in your head and get absorbed into your subconscious, but lots of them get lost to time & distraction. The artist collects them, knowing they can build up to something more. They then revisit their repertoire often, immersing themselves in the things that speak to them and listening to what they have to say. (I of course use mymind for my secret repertoire, since it’s made for this.)
And this is important: Your repertoire should be private. Not a Pinterest board, not your Instagram. As soon as you start collecting these things for an audience, you’re shutting your creative instinct down. You start curating and performing what you think your audience wants to see, or disregarding something that inspires you because you’re worried about what someone might think. Keep it tucked away just for yourself. Let it be chaotic and contradicting. It’s the only way this can work.
As a creative person, your repertoire is your secret weapon. It makes creativity less mystical and more practical, like something you can actually control and wield. You don’t have to wait for random inspiration to strike because you’re constantly feeding the machine.
As the ad man James Webb Young put it:
“Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us.”
Gather the raw material. Energetically sometimes, but also passively. Not indifferently (you don’t want to throw your whole desktop of trash in there, or someone else’s Pinterest page, or you’ll have no real connection to it and it becomes meaningless) but ambivalently. You might have mixed feelings about something you see or experience. Save it. Friction in your repertoire is good. It may lead to something novel and unexpected. Which brings me to another quote, this one from Steve Jobs:
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
Your secret repertoire is a way to make the creative solution obvious, by connecting your experiences and synthesizing new things. Start now. Do it privately. Watch the ideas come to you.