I remember when I was about seven or eight years old drawing all the time. I would create cars that could fly through the sky, weird machines, houses, cities, whatever came into my head. None of it had to make sense. That was probably the best part.

My sister and I would also turn our living room into a game of lava. The floor was hot lava and if you touched it, obviously, you were dead. LOL. We would jump from the couch to the chairs and whatever else we could find without touching the floor. Looking back, I’m still not really sure how we got away with that with my Mom.

But I think about those moments because there was something happening in our brains that we don’t give enough credit to as adults. We were creating without thinking about whether we were being creative. There wasn’t a strategy meeting before we started. Nobody asked what the ROI was on turning the living room into a volcano. Nobody told me a flying car wasn’t realistic. We just imagined it. I have always wondered why that seems to disappear as we get older. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we just stop practicing it.

As adults, we are trained to find the correct answer. Be efficient. Follow the process. Stay inside the budget. Hit the deadline. Don’t embarrass yourself by suggesting something too crazy in the meeting. All of those things have a place, especially in business. But over time they can also build a pretty good cage around your imagination.

The neuroscience around creativity is interesting because it isn’t just one switch in the brain. Different networks are doing different jobs. Some help us wander, associate and connect ideas, while others help us judge whether those ideas actually make sense. You need both.

The problem is we spend a lot of our working lives exercising the judgment side. Is it on brand? Can we afford it? Will the client approve it? Can we get this done by Friday? Important questions. But ask them too early and they can kill a good idea before it ever has a chance to grow.

Sometimes the best thing you can do creatively is stop trying so damn hard to be creative. There is some interesting research around incubation and mind wandering that suggests there may actually be something to this. You work on something, get away from it, let your attention move somewhere else and then come back. Your brain can keep making connections while you’re doing something completely unrelated. That’s probably why you’ve had an idea in the shower that you couldn’t come up with after two hours staring at a computer.

Go for a walk. Read a book. Watch a podcast. Go outside. Spend time in nature. Have dinner with your family. Call somebody you haven’t talked to in a while. Sometimes those things aren’t distractions from the work. They are part of the work.

There has also been research showing that walking can improve our ability to generate creative ideas compared with sitting. It doesn’t necessarily make us better at choosing the right answer, but it can help us come up with more possibilities. Which gives us a pretty simple rule. Walk when you need possibilities. Sit down when you need to pick one. I’ve had plenty of times where staring harder at a monitor did absolutely nothing, then I walked away and suddenly the answer showed up. There should probably be more walking meetings and fewer conference room meetings.

And maybe we need to get comfortable being bored again too. Think about how little boredom we allow into our lives now. Standing in line? Phone. Waiting for someone? Phone. Walking somewhere? Podcast. Sitting quietly for five minutes? Better check email. Sometimes even our creative reset becomes more input. Not every walk needs a podcast. Not every quiet moment needs a screen. Sometimes your brain might need ten minutes where nobody is giving it something new to process. Remember staring out the car window as a kid? We probably did more thinking than we realized.

Another problem starts showing up when you’ve been working inside the same company, product or industry for a long time. The echo chamber can become deafening. You don’t even realize it’s happening because everybody is smart. Everybody knows the product. Everybody knows the customer. Everybody knows what the competition is doing. And that’s exactly the problem.

Marketing people follow marketing people. Designers follow designers. Video companies watch other video companies. SaaS companies study SaaS companies. AI companies watch other AI companies talk about AI. Eventually everybody starts looking at everybody else. Then somebody says, “We need something fresh.” Fresh from where?

This is why I don’t think you should ever discount feedback because it came from somewhere you normally wouldn’t look. Ask someone in accounting what they think. Ask the new employee. Ask someone in sales. Ask your spouse. Show the idea to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about your industry. Sometimes the person who doesn’t understand your product is exactly the person you need to talk to because your customer may not understand it either.

Don’t ask them to solve the problem. Ask what confused them. Ask what they noticed first. Ask what they thought you were trying to say. Outside opinions aren’t automatically right either. You’re not handing somebody else the steering wheel. You’re looking for the thing they noticed that everyone inside the room stopped seeing. You can be pleasantly surprised where a really good insight comes from.

Sometimes bringing somebody in from the outside helps too. As your product or service becomes more complicated, the expectation for the customer to understand it usually goes up. You know too much. Your team knows too much. You’ve been staring at the same thing for six months, a year, maybe five years. At some point another set of eyes can help turbocharge the creative output. Not because your team isn’t good. There are levels to the game.

Think about Olympic ski jumping. You can be a really good skier and still have absolutely no business flying off an Olympic ski jump. Noriaki Kasai competed in eight Winter Olympics as a ski jumper. Decades of perfecting the approach, timing the takeoff, controlling his body in the air, understanding wind, balance and landing. Technically, you could say both of you know how to ski. That’s where the similarities end. Creative work can be like that.

A good marketing team understands marketing. A product team understands the product. A founder understands the vision better than anyone. But someone who has spent twenty years taking complicated ideas and figuring out how to make another human being understand them is exercising a different muscle. Sometimes you need that muscle in the room. And that outside perspective doesn’t necessarily have to come from an agency. It could be a consultant, a customer, another department, a creative partner or just somebody smart enough to ask the question everyone else stopped asking. Experience with a dash of common sense can bring a fresh breath of air into whatever bottleneck or challenge you’re dealing with.

Then, of course, we have AI. I love AI. I use it all the time. I think it is one of the biggest creative accelerators we’ve ever been handed. But there is something we should be paying attention to. AI gets a lot more interesting when you give it interesting ingredients. Context. Experience. Strange references. Taste. Constraints. Things everybody else isn’t feeding it.

There has already been some fascinating research around this. In one study, people using generative AI produced stories that were judged as more creative, but those stories also started becoming more similar to each other. That was one experiment around creative writing, not proof that every AI-assisted marketing campaign is becoming the same. But if that same pattern starts playing out across marketing, design and content, that’s the scary part to me.

What happens when everybody is asking the same AI the same questions? What happens when everybody is looking at the same campaigns, the same LinkedIn posts, the same websites and the same five brands sitting on every mood board? You could end up with better work individually and more sameness collectively.

If everybody in your market has access to the same technology, eventually the technology itself isn’t the advantage. The input is. Your experience matters. Your taste matters. The strange reference nobody else thought about matters. The twenty years of mistakes you’ve made matter. Common sense matters. AI can connect a lot of dots, but somebody still has to decide which dots are worth connecting.

There is something else worth protecting. Imperfections make us human. Perfection makes us something else. Think about the people you enjoy talking to. They don’t speak in perfectly constructed paragraphs. They stop. They change direction. They tell a story that probably could have been shorter. They laugh at themselves. Sometimes they use the wrong word. And somehow that is part of what makes the conversation interesting.

Creativity lives in some of those imperfections. A machine naturally wants to clean things up. Sometimes we need to know when not to let it.

You don’t need to book a cabin in the mountains for three weeks to work on creativity. If you’re stuck, write down ten ideas. Then force yourself to write ten more. Your brain will usually give you the safe answers first. Somewhere around number twelve or seventeen, things can start getting weird. That’s good.

Ask the opposite question. If everybody in your industry is doing talking-head videos, what happens if nobody appears in yours? If every competitor leads with technology, what happens if you lead with a human problem? If every company is trying to make its website sound sophisticated, what happens if you explain what you do like you’re talking to someone sitting across the table? You don’t necessarily use the opposite idea. The point is to shake the tree.

Try looking at your problem through somebody else’s brain. How would a seven-year-old explain this? How would a chef approach it? How would a movie director introduce it? How would your grandmother describe what your company does after hearing your pitch once? That last one might hurt a little. But it might also tell you something.

For your next marketing campaign, don’t immediately ask, “What should we say about our product?” Ask what is happening in your customer’s life five minutes before they realize they need you. That’s a completely different starting point.

For your next video, turn the sound off and watch the first ten seconds. Do you understand what is happening? Then do the opposite. Close your eyes and listen. Does the story still work?

For your next visual project, don’t immediately go to the same design sites everybody else is looking at. Look at architecture. Old magazines. Movie titles. Fashion. Cars. Food packaging. Museums. Nature. Album covers. Industrial equipment. I don’t care. Look somewhere else.

Some of the best creative ideas happen when you bring something from one world into another world where it doesn’t normally belong. That’s basically what my flying cars were when I was seven. A car belonged on the ground. An airplane belonged in the sky. My brain didn’t care. So I combined them.

Read more. Take a walk. Spend time outside. Watch something that has nothing to do with your job. And sometimes watch nothing at all. Talk to people outside your normal circle. Ask the stupid question. Listen when somebody says something you initially want to dismiss.

Use AI. Absolutely use AI. But don’t outsource your imagination to it. Every once in a while, bring somebody new into the room who hasn’t been staring at the same walls as everybody else.

Creativity isn’t just about making something look cool. It helps us communicate. It helps us solve business problems. It helps us understand people. It helps us navigate change. And sometimes it helps us figure out what to do when life throws something at us that wasn’t in the plan.

Maybe the goal isn’t to become more creative. Maybe the goal is to remove some of the things we’ve spent the last thirty or forty years putting in the way of it. That kid jumping from couch to chair trying to avoid the hot lava might have understood something we forgot. He wasn’t wasting time. He was practicing.

Need a jump start on a creative ask? I’ve got my paper and crayons ready. Let’s be a little silly together. Life probably needs more of that anyway.

Need a jump start on a creative ask? I’ve got my paper and crayons ready. Let’s be a little silly together. Life probably needs more of that anyway. Let’s talk!

Your creative guide,
Robert Cordova