Where do new ideas come from?
Nearly all Great Work begins with a single new idea.
If you know how to produce new ideas, you raise your odds of finding meaningful work.
But most people never learn how.
They wait for inspiration to strike. When it doesn’t, they assume they lack the ability to think creatively.
Like any skill, creativity has a process. Anyone can learn to think creatively by following five simple steps.
The 5 Steps of the Creative Process
In 1940, an advertising executive named James Webb Young published a short guide called A Technique for Producing Ideas. In it, he made a simple observation. A new idea is “nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.”
You combine what you already know in a way no one has tried before. Creativity is your ability to see how ideas relate and connect them in interesting ways.
Young said the mind moves through five steps, in order.
- Gather new material. First, you learn. Go deep into one subject you’re curious about, and explore unrelated topics as well. Obsess over one thing while you cast a wide net.
- Work the material over. Look at what you’ve learned from different angles, and test how the pieces fit together.
- Step away from the problem. Put it out of your mind and do something that energizes you. Your mind keeps working while you rest.
- Let the idea come to you. Once you stop thinking about it, the idea returns in a flash of insight.
- Refine it with feedback. Release the idea into the world, let others test it, and adjust.
The Creative Process Applied to Great Work
Here’s how I used these five steps to find what I believe is my Great Work.
First, I gathered new material. I spent years learning the root causes of pain and how to diagnose and treat them. Along the way, I followed my curiosity into spirituality, suffering, technology, and science fiction.
When in doubt, follow your curiosity.
Second, I worked the material over in my mind. I looked for gaps in pain management and tried to picture the field in five to ten years. I knew AI and robotics would reshape healthcare. I also knew suffering would remain, no matter how well we treated pain. So I tested combinations: pain and spirituality, pain and AI, pain and robotics.
Unique ideas require trial and error.
Third, I stepped away, more out of frustration than by design. I gave up on innovating in my field and spent my spare time reading fiction, something I love. Young himself said this stage is the time for music, theater, poetry, or a detective story.
However long you step away, fill the time with what you love.
Fourth, the idea came when I least expected it. Months later, my wife told me her friends had built an AI platform that helps dermatologists route and resolve cases. We were getting ready for bed, and I was looking over her shoulder as she tested it. Suddenly, I had a flash of insight. What if I built this for pain management?
Insight arrives when you stop chasing it.
Finally, I refined the idea with feedback. I reached out to the team and offered to partner on an AI agent for pain management. As it happened, they’d seen DermFlow work in dermatology and wanted to expand into other specialties. Together, we built version one, tested it, and kept iterating.
Great ideas grow in successive versions.
Look closely, and nothing in my idea was new. Years of pain medicine. A platform someone else built. The only new part was putting them together.
So where do new ideas come from? From what you already know, combined in a way no one has seen.