How can a book first published in the 1940s still be relevant to today’s creative professionals? By answering a question that inspired Chicago-based Advertising Executive James Webb Young to write it in the first place. How do you get ideas?

I recently read this book in its entirety in about an hour (it’s all of 48 pages). For those of you who only have a few minutes, I will summarize it here.

Step 1 – The Gathering of Raw Materials
While it seems like an obvious first step, it is often overlooked or not taken seriously enough (probably because it looks like work). The work you put in is extremely important as it is the base for any ideas to come. Far too many people sit around waiting for inspiration to strike.

For this step, Young recommends using 3×5 cards and writing down any information gathered so that it can be spread out, categorized, and filed easily.

The materials which must be gathered are of two kinds: specific and general. In advertising, the specific are those relating to the product and to the people whom you wish to sell it to. General materials are of equal importance as ideas are nothing more than a new combination of existing elements. In advertising, an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people—with general knowledge about life and events.

He likens it to a kaleidoscope. Every turn shifts bits of colored glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number of pieces of glass in it, the greater the possibilities of new combinations.

When gathering information, dig deep. On the surface there often appears to be no differences at all, but if you go deep enough you will nearly always find that between every product and some consumers there is an individuality of relationship, which may lead to an idea.

Step 2 – The Working Over of These Materials
This part of the process is harder to describe in concrete terms because it goes on entirely in your head. Take the different bits of materials you gathered on your 3×5 cards and feel them all over with your mind. Take facts, turn them this way and that, look for the meaning of them, bring facts together, and see how they fit.  

What you are searching for is the relationship, a synthesis where everything comes together like a puzzle. When looking for meaning, don’t scan them too directly or too literally; facts often reveal their meaning more quickly this way. Like the winged messenger who’s wings could only be seen when looked at obliquely. It’s this part of the process that the truly creative excel, and the part in which they often earn their reputation for absentmindedness.

As you go through this process, two things will happen. First, tentative or partial ideas will come to you. Write down ANY that sprout. Never mind how crazy or incomplete they may seem.  

The second thing that will happen is that after a while, you will get very tired of trying to fit your puzzle pieces together. Keep trying. Your brain, much like the body, also has a second wind.

Step 3 – The Incubating Stage
When you feel you’ve reached a point of hopelessness and everything is a jumble in your mind with no clear insight anywhere, drop it and walk away. Do something that stimulates your imagination or emotions. Listen to music, play with your kids, go to a movie. You’ve gathered info and masticated it well; now it’s time for the digestive process to kick in.

Step 4 – Eureka! I have it!
If you have really done your part in the first three stages of the process, you will almost surely experience the fourth. Out of nowhere the idea will appear, sometimes when you are least expecting it.  

Young sites an example from Mr. Ives, the inventor of the half-tone printing process. “While operating my photo-stereotype process in Ithaca, I studied the problem of half-tone process. I went to bed one night in a state of brain-fag over the problem and the instant I woke in the morning saw before me, apparently projected on the ceiling, the completely worked-out process and equipment in operation.”

This is the way ideas come: after you have stopped straining for them and have passed through a period of rest and relaxation from the search.

Step 5 – The Final Shaping and Development of the Idea to Practical Usefulness
In the final step of the process, you have to take your little, newborn idea out into the cold world of reality and see how it holds up. Many seemingly good ideas are lost when trying to make them fit into the practical exigencies in which they must work.

If it holds true, a really good idea will have self-expanding capabilities. It should stimulate those who see it to add to it. Possibilities in it which you overlooked will come to light and grow into form.