This week's research

This idea can be applied to fake news too – 'Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult'.

Here’s what Hans Zimmer says about the shameful agony of creativity

"Today, Zimmer is an accomplished composer who Hollywood directors and producers seek out, but he still believes he must go through “a period of agony and torture” before achieving a breakthrough.

Despite his creative setbacks, Zimmer pushes himself to avoid fixed ways of thinking, and he advises new artists who want to do the same to try something new every day.

How can you find an idea that’s novel and useful, as Hans Zimmer did with the Dark Knight soundtrack? Well, I’d like you to think of your creative project as like a mountain.

At the top of this mountain, you can mine bizarre, outlandish and absurd ideas and at the bottom of the mountain you can extract practical, relevant and logical ideas.

Now, you’re not looking to set up camp at the top of this mountain because conditions up there are too inhospitable for your ideas to thrive. There’s also little point in settling at the bottom of this mountain because basecamp is a crowded place; we’ve all been there before.

Instead, there’s a hidden place between the points of absurdity and relevancy rich in novel and useful ideas. Think of it as like a secret forge where you can combine the novelty of the absurd with the applicability of the practical. Here, you will finally master your inner genius.

Be absurd as possible

The next time you’re struggling with a creative project, try to come up with as many absurd ideas as possible. Push past your point of comfort and cognitive biases and have fun with your ideas, fantasies and daydreams.

… then seek out what’s relevant

Once you have these absurd ideas, work your way down to what’s relevant — move from composing music with razor blades toward the cello playing a single note. The climb down is always easier. Remember, it’s okay to explore hunches, probe new avenues of thought and bring back anything unusual or odd that you find. Later on, sift through these discoveries and figure out what’s usable and what to put aside.
Your creative ideas are never wrong, not even the absurd ones."