14.
Forget about it
It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.
Publilius Syrus
Eric: My wife’s got a terrible memory.
Ernie: Really?
Eric: Yes, she never forgets a thing.
Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise
There are three things I always forget. Names, faces—the third I can’t remember.
Italo Svevo
This is something you do only after you follow the advice in the previous chapter.
It is also something that I didn’t get the chance to do often enough in advertising. Usually there wasn’t time to forget about problems. You had to get ideas now. Not tomorrow. Now.
It’s the same in journalism. Just listen to Andy Rooney: “The best creative ideas are the result of the same slow, selective, cognitive process that produces the sum of a column of figures. Anyone who waits for an idea to strike him has a long wait coming. If I have a deadline for a column or a television script, I sit down at the typewriter and damn well decide to have an idea. There’s nothing magical about the process.”
But I think Mr. Rooney is making a law out of a necessity.
I do not mean to disparage the hard work Mr. Rooney champions. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, it is essential.
But the weight of evidence suggests that when you’re having trouble solving a problem or coming up with an idea, forgetting about it is also essential.
Hermann von Helmholtz said: “So far as I am concerned they [ideas] have never come to me when my mind was fatigued or when I was at my working table.”
Albert Einstein said his best ideas came to him while he was shaving.
Grant Wood said: “All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”
Henri Poincaré tells of working hard to solve a math problem. He failed, so he went on a holiday. As he stepped on a bus, suddenly the answer came to him.
“I have found,” Bertrand Russell wrote, “that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity of which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I would return consciously to the topic and find that the work had been done.”
C. G. Suits, the legendary chief of research at General Electric, said that all the discoveries in research laboratories came as hunches during a period of relaxation, following a period of intensive thinking and fact gathering.
Rollo May believes that inspiration comes from sources in the unconscious that are stimulated by conscious “hard work” and then liberated by the “rest” that follows it.
“Saturate yourself through and through with your subject . . . and wait” is Lloyd Morgan’s advice.
Indeed, as Philip Goldberg pointed out in The Babinski Reflex, this phenomenon (which he dubs the “Eureka Effect” after Archimedes and his bathtub discovery) occurs so often it “has been identified as a common feature of scientific discovery, artistic creation, problem solving, and decision making.”
So when you get stuck on an idea or a project or a problem, or when the little ideas stop coming as fast as they did and you still don’t have the big idea, or when it feels as if you’re pounding your head against an iron gate, or when things get labored and difficult, or whenever that little voice inside you starts saying, “This isn’t working,” forget about it and work on something else.
Note that I didn’t say forget about it and relax, or forget about it and vegetate, or forget about it and watch sitcoms on TV for a week.
I said forget about it and work on something else.
In my experience, mental relaxation (except for meditation) is overrated. It might even be counterproductive, for it stops momentum, it suffocates your interests, it shuts down the effort it takes to look at things hard enough to recognize similarities and connections and relationships.
Oh, sure, I know that everybody espouses the virtues of kicking back and letting the world go by.
But people who let the world go by simply let the world go by.
They don’t make a mark. They don’t make a difference. They don’t come up with ideas.
And that’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it? Come up with ideas?
OK then, listen to me—when you forget about one thing, start working on another thing.
In advertising, writers and art directors do this whenever they can. When they’re having trouble coming up with, say, ideas for a television commercial for a motorcycle and it isn’t due until next week, they put that assignment aside and start working on ideas for a newspaper ad on cheese, or for a billboard on a bank. A couple of days later they come back to the motorcycle assignment and, magically, ideas fill the room.
But what if you don’t have another project to work on?
Then get one.
The secret is to switch gears; to let your unconscious work on the problem that’s giving you trouble, while your conscious mind works on something else; to “sleep on” one problem while you start working on another.
Carl Sagan did that. When he got stuck on one project, he moved on to the next, allowing his unconscious to go to work. “When you come back,” he wrote, “you find to your amazement, nine times out of ten, that you have solved your problem—or your unconscious has—without you even knowing it.”
So did Isaac Asimov. “When I feel difficulty coming on,” he wrote, “I switch to another book I’m writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.”
But again: Keep working on something. Get another project and work on it.
Don’t think that you’ve got to give your brain a rest. You don’t. It’s not a muscle that gets fatigued.
Besides, your unconscious doesn’t know or care whether it’s working on a project that might change the world or on solving the latest trashy whodunnit. It works just as hard regardless.
That’s one of the reasons busy people get a lot done and can always handle another project—they’ve learned to focus their efforts on meaningful projects.
And they’ve learned to let much of their work “proceed underground.”
For here is a super truth:
The more you do, the more you do;
the less you do, the less you do.
You know it’s true. You know that one weekend you make a list of things you want to get done around the house and all of a sudden you get busy and you discover that you’ve got a lot of things to do and you get them all done. Another weekend you sit on your ass and watch the world go by and don’t do a damn thing.
Work creates work. Effort creates effort.
And ideas create ideas.
After all, you have to think about something so why not think about some other idea or problem or project?
And if after a while the solution to the original problem doesn’t come to you while you’re shaving or milking a cow or getting on a bus, start back to work on it. When you do, you’ll probably see roads that were not there before; closed doors will be open, barriers will be down; you’ll have new insights and feel new hope and see new relationships and connections and structures and possibilities.
And that’s when the idea will hit.
Wham.
“Ah,” you’ll say. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
