Every creative has experienced this. You sit down to solve the problem. You stare at the brief. You brainstorm. You mind-map. You freewrite. Nothing.
Then you walk away. You make coffee. You take a shower. You're thinking about something completely unrelated and — there it is. The answer. Obvious now. Invisible five minutes ago.
Ideas don't arrive when summoned. They arrive when you're distracted.
There's science behind this. Your brain has two modes: focused and diffuse. Focused mode is good for execution. Diffuse mode is good for connections. When you're staring at the problem, you're in focused mode. When you're thinking about nothing, you're in diffuse mode. And diffuse mode is where ideas live.
Salvador Dalí would sit in a chair holding a key above a metal plate. As he drifted toward sleep, his hand would relax, the key would fall, the noise would wake him. And he'd paint what he'd seen in that liminal space between waking and dreaming.
“Eureka." arrived in Archimedes’s bath, not in his laboratory. The answer was always there. He just had to stop looking for it to see it.
I've learned to trust this process. When I'm stuck, I don't fight it anymore. I walk. I read something unrelated. I let my brain wander. Because wandering is where connections happen. And connections are where ideas live.
Idea we need is already there. We just need to stop looking for it long enough to see it.