An 84-year-old advertising memo still runs your best ideas
In 1940 a copywriter wrote down the exact five steps his mind took before every good idea — and most people still skip two of them.
James Webb Young spent decades as an advertising man before he did something almost nobody else bothered to: he tracked, in order, what his own mind actually did in the moments before a good idea showed up. The result, published in 1940, is barely fifty pages, and it still gets handed around because the five steps he found hold up.
First, you gather material — not just facts about the specific problem, but a wide, unrelated pile of anything that interests you. Second, you turn it over in your head, forcing connections, until you're genuinely tired of it. Third — and this is the step people skip — you stop. Put the whole problem down and go do something that has nothing to do with it. Fourth, the idea arrives unannounced, often while you're doing something else entirely. Fifth, you drag it back into the cold light of morning and see if it survives contact with reality.
Most people work steps one and two, panic when nothing arrives, and never get to step three. Young's whole case is that the walk away isn't wasted time.
It's the step doing the actual work.