Ana Melo – 12th May 2011
The mentor I most remember from SCA was Graham Fink. And no, it was not due to some of the reasons that you might already have in your mind: he didn’t just come in, make a show, present his work, and make us all dribble in adoration and beg for his attention. He in fact taught us something that I find one of the key tools for creativity but is most of the time flouted.
Stillness.
We’ve been taught, and I’ve experienced it myself (even though I haven’t doing this very long), that in order to have great ideas you have to give them space. Ideas need space and stillness to come to the surface.
If you are constantly busy, moving like a blender set on full, a great idea might be somewhere deep down inside you, but it gets scattered into a billion bits on the way up through the turmoil and tumult going on in your life.
“In fact, it is almost like listening for the meaning instead of looking for it”. Writes William Bernbach in his book “A Technique for Producing Ideas”.
So, I ask this question: is an ad agency, with all its frenetic and agitated life, constant hubbub, people interrupting you all the time, the right place for creatives to work? Is it the place that makes the best use of the creativity of all the people in there? Or would it be much more productive if either, all the agencies had a “quite” zone for creative thinking or creatives just could spend more time outside the agency?
I don’t know the solution, but what I do know is that stillness is a key to creativity and we should encourage it and learn to apply it more in the process.
Fink certainly does it and the results certainly don’t seem to be negative.
P.S. – Sorry for the English mistakes. Its not that I wasn’t still. I’m just Portuguese.
