This month, we plunge deep into the heart of autumn, which in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere means harvest season. As you take the kids to a pumpkin patch, or fill up on beer at an Octoberfest celebration, it’s good to remember that the roots of these modern-day celebrations are related to marking the end of growing season. When the daylight grew shorter and the leaves fell from the trees, our ancestors would use the season to gather in their bounty and prepare for a long, barren winter.
While harvesting the raw material of creative endeavors—ideas—can happen year round, it helps to be ready. “Chance favors the prepared mind,” scientist Louis Pasteur once noted, and there are tools and attitudes that can make the capture of ideas more certain and less laden with apprehension. Here are four tips for better idea harvesting that can help you fill your mental/emotional storehouse with ideas that can later be used to create powerful works of art or businesses that make a positive difference in peoples’ lives.
Harvest Tip #1: Embed a variety of digital and analog idea-capturing tools into your life. If you come to regard creative ideas as entities that come to you regularly (and they will, if you practice your craft on a regular basis and fill your mind with nourishing images and thoughts), you will want to develop a system to record them for later use. Always having several idea-recording devices nearby to collect our ideas ensures that our best impulses will not be forgotten and that we’ll have a set of pre-recorded thoughts to turn to when we feel creatively “dry” and in need of inspiration.
The simplest analog idea-capturing tools are often the best.
- Notebooks, specific to the sort of jotting (writing, sketching, plotting or designing) you’ll be doing.
- Index cards. Merlin Mann, the creator of 43 Folders, once famously called a packet of notecards The Hipster PDA, and keeping a pile of them handy is useful for recording a single idea on a single piece of paper.
- An audio tape recorder. Yes, it’s a very archaic idea. And it does require electricity or batteries to run the recorder. But consider this – audio cassettes are dirt cheap to purchase in bulk these days. Generations of big-wigs swear by expressing their thoughts via dictation—maybe it’ll work for you!
- File folders filled with items that relate to projects you might want to work on. You can collect paint chips, clippings from magazines, maps, sheet music, etc.
On the digital side, there is an ever-expanding menu of options to employ.
- Digital audio recorders. These are everywhere, offer a number of options for export, and some mobile phones even offer a “voice notes” feature that let you dictate on the fly. If you would like to have your voice messages being transcribed into text, you can purchase a mobile or web-based application like Jott.
- Digital still cameras, including the ones that are part of most present-day cel phones. See something funny that sparks an idea? Snap a picture of it. If you want to work with a procession of images that tells a story, you can purchase the Hitchcock application for your iPhone and create a storyboard for future reference.
- Use a social bookmarking application such as Delicious. This ensures you can access your website bookmarks anywhere you have an Internet connection.
Harvest Tip #2: Remember that idea capture is just the beginning of the creative process.
Too often we expect our flashes of insight to contain the entire sweep of the completed creative product and get disappointed when they don’t. Think of your newly captured idea as a seed. You wouldn’t yell at a packet of wildflower seeds for not already being flowers, would you? You’d make sure they were planted somewhere they would receive appropriate amounts of sunlight and rain, and you’d take care to plant them at the right time, so the long warm days of spring and summer would help them bloom. Rejoice in the potential your captured idea-seeds contain, and discipline yourself to take the steps necessary to cultivate them.
Harvest Tip #3: Don’t ask: “Can I do this?” Ask: “Who can help me do this?”
Another way in which we fail to harvest good ideas is when we discount ones that we cannot accomplish by ourselves. Artists in disciplines that emphasize individual effort, such as writing or painting, tend to assume that an idea is “too big” because they have not mastered their media well enough; that may be true, but it is also possible that it’s an idea that requires collaboration to bring out its full potential. Don’t assume just because you can’t do it all that your idea will never get done.
Harvest Tip #4: Embrace the fact that not all your creative ideas will bear fruit.
Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” It’s easy to fall in love with your ideas—they’re yours, after all—and lose sight of which ones truly have staying power and which ones don’t quite hit the mark on their own, but may become springboards for better ideas later. Recognizing the truth that not all ideas are destined to become finished projects allows you to evaluate each thought on its own merits. It also removes the temptation to force an idea beyond its natural level of usefulness.
