In this video, we explore the mysterious process of generating creative ideas, breaking it down into a four-step method known as BIAS: Bound, Ingest, Arrange, and Stop.

Drawing inspiration from James Webb Young’s classic technique for producing ideas, we’ll look at how setting boundaries, consuming diverse content, organizing your thoughts, and then stepping away from the work leads to breakthroughs. You'll learn how to harness the power of your subconscious mind to come up with innovative ideas, with practical tips on how to create the perfect conditions for inspiration to strike.

Transcript

Getting ideas is the most fun part of starting a new project. You get to just dive into a subject that you are passionate and excited about and you can just consume everything in sight. It's a ton of fun.

And like many creative things, getting ideas is not something that you go about in a super direct way.

I mean, getting ideas could be summarized as just...

ingest bunch of stuff,
brew on it,
and an idea pops up.

It's that simple, but also that mysterious. Like what happened here?

Dunno, nobody does.

I'll explain why shortly.

Quick detour before we get into it. Here's something super fun that can help you start feeling out a direction for your project. If you're into music, give yourself a soundtrack.

The filmmaker Ari Aster wrote the film "Midsummer" while listening to the British electronic musician, the Hacks and Clokes album Excavation. Check it out. You can hear how this creates a mood, a tone. It pulls you in a direction.

So give yourself a soundtrack. Listen to mood music when you are researching, writing, daydreaming, relaxing, whatever. Have fun with

All right, ready? Let's dig in. Let's get some ideas. Where ideas come from is an eternal mystery. Even authors who seem best equipped to reveal to us where ideas come from can't. The author, Neil Gaiman, simply put it this way.

We don't really know. And we're terrified the ideas will go away.

Ideas are mysterious for a very simple reason. They are generated by your subconscious mind, the part of your mind that you're unaware of. Your conscious mind, where we do what we consider thinking, never actually sees how the idea gets made. Your subconscious mind is the hero in your idea-seeking quest. Your job is to set it up so it can do its thing. The weird part is you will never actually be aware of what it's doing until it just lays an idea on you.

All you can do is create the conditions from which an idea will emerge.

So I have a process that does just this. I have used it for many years and it truly works. I don't think it has ever not worked. And further, I think any creator that you admire is doing some version of what I'm about to describe. This method is based on James Webb Young's short 1939 book, A Technique for Producing Ideas. Over the years, I've adapted it for my own needs. Without further ado, these are the four steps for getting an idea. I'll briefly introduce them here. Then I will go through them in detail.

Step 1: Bound

This is a simple and possibly brief, but vital phase in which you decide the boundaries in which you are going to explore.

Step 2: Ingest

In this step, you'll eat up everything you can within these boundaries. You can just think of this as research, but that makes it sound less fun than it actually is.

Step 3: Arrange

Next, you'll arrange the material which you have acquired. You'll study, organize, map, create stories, and so on.

Step 4: Stop

Yes, stop. Walk away, unplug, go do other things. That's when the magic happens. That's when the idea comes. You will then get an idea or ideas. Hopefully you'll get a small crop of them.

You can remember these four steps as BIAS:

• Bound

• Ingest

• Arrange

• Stop

All right, that's the overview. Let's go deeper with each of these.

Step 1: Bound

The first thing you need to do is establish boundaries. This will create a perimeter in which you will explore.

You're limiting yourself to one area and removing everything else. So you start with something like, let's say I wanna know everything about video essays from 2010, and you should be intensely interested in what lies within those boundaries.

This step is very important because if you get it wrong, you gotta start over. That's not quite as bad as it sounds, but let's try to avoid it. There are two mistakes you can make here.

You can choose boundaries that are too big, or you can choose boundaries that are too small. In other words, you can give yourself too much direction or not enough direction.

If you make your boundaries too small, you won't experience enough variety, okay? It's hard to come up with something exciting and different if you've limited yourself to a very small niche.

For instance, if you design cars and you just study four-door sedans, you will likely come up with just another four-door sedan.

If your boundaries are too small, you get mediocre ideas. Your imagination needs variety. It needs varying elements to play with.

Now, if you make your boundaries too large, your most likely outcome is no idea at all. When it comes to creativity, there most certainly is such a thing as too much freedom.

As is so often the case in life, you are seeking balance. You are seeking the sweet spot. You want that point that just feels right.

You want boundaries that are big enough to give you exciting possibilities, but narrow enough to give you a direction. As you do this more and more, you'll develop a feel for

Step 2: Ingest

Next, you will ingest everything you can within the boundaries you have established.

You will read books, talk to people, travel, try products, listen to music, taste foods, do whatever suits your subject.

In other words, you'll research. You will learn all you can within your area of interest.

Go deep here. This is the rare occasion where binging is good.

When you should leave the ingest phase is very difficult to describe, think of it this way. It's a feeling. Stop when you feel like your brain is full. When you feel like you've got a mind full, you're there. It's time to move on.

But here's that sweet spot again. Make sure you do indeed have a brain full. You don't want to leave this phase too early. You want to be fully saturated and filled to the brim. So if you have doubts about whether you've got a brain full or not, keep going, stay put, keep ingesting.

Step 3: Arrange

Next, you will study the materials you've collected and organize them. You'll arrange them into narratives, group things together, find connections, create maps of what you've learned, and more.

t is human nature to spend too much time on the previous phase, on the ingest phase. We are collectors by nature, whether it's books or magic cards or Pokemons or shoes or plants.

We love to collect. It's just a thing people enjoy. Arranging things might not feel like quite so much fun. Well, roll up your sleeves. It's time to do that homework.

And when you can find ways to make this process feel more fun, then do it. Like if you want to get a bulletin board and some red string and go on what feels like a conspiracy adventure, then have fun, and go for it. When you can make things more fun, then do it. This work is surprisingly hard, especially the deeper that you get. So when you can find ways to make things more fun, do it.

In the ingest phase, you might have to push yourself a little bit to stop. In the arrange phase, you might have to push yourself to keep going.

Now, I'm sure some of you might be thinking, are you kidding me? I love arranging things. This is gonna be even more fun than the last phase was. For you folks, let me warn you about something called analysis paralysis.

Don't let yourself get distracted by arranging and arranging and rearranging and finding new and different arrangements and on and on and on and on.

Again, the sweet spot is always your goal, folks. And the more you do this, the more you'll develop a feeling for when it is time to move on. All right, let's pause for a moment and recap because it's a lot, right? A lot has just happened. That was basically the whole process.

You've now done the hard work, okay? With these first three steps, you've gotten a teeming pot of ingredients bubbling away. And by arranging these materials as much as you can, you've set your subconscious mind up to work on generating an idea. Your subconscious mind will now take over and keep working on this problem. You won't be aware that this is happening, but it will be. You've given your mind a problem to solve and it will. This brings us to the final step and this is the easy one.

Step 4: Stop

We've arrived at the plot twist, folks. You now stop. Move on, go hang out with your family or friends, go on a walk, go see a movie, take a little vacation, do whatever your life and your schedule will allow. Your subconscious mind will now continue to play with this mass of information that you have filled it with.

Ideas like to happen in quiet moments, okay? And they often happen in one of the simplest of all human activities, walking. I cannot recall how many times people have told me that they get ideas while walking.

Other routine activities are also effective, showers, driving, cooking, gardening, riding your bike, sitting on a bus or subway.

Notice that these are all activities that require little of us. Ideas tend to come when your mind is open and unoccupied. In my very unscientific opinion, motion is good. Now that can mean moving your own body like going to take a walk or it can mean your body moving through space like on a train. JK Rowling, for instance, got the idea for Harry Potter while on a train. The objective here is to give your mind a break. Don't zone out on a bunch of social media or television shows. Don't stuff your mind with a bunch of nonsense.

Now, when an idea springs up, grab it, capture it.

The filmmaker David Lynch claims he has lost two or three big ideas. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas and it may make you sick, it's just horrible. Write the idea down. You say, well, never forget this idea. Uh-uh, you can forget them. Your short-term memory is very short indeed. It's about 15 to 30 seconds. So when the idea arrives, the clock is ticking. Repeat it to yourself, hold it in your mind and then write it down. Make sure you give it enough detail that you can remember the full idea later. Don't just write down a few vague terms that don't really describe the idea.

I'll talk more about notes later, but your phone is perfect for this because it's with you most of the time or just carry a paper notebook. Do whatever you like, whatever works, do it. Okay, so after you stop, how long do you wait for an idea to appear?

I can't tell you exactly, but I would say it shouldn't take too long because after a while your mind will move on to other things. I would guess more like days or weeks. If it's taking months, I would say that it didn't work and you need to start over.

All right, here's what to do if this doesn't work. Let's say you've done everything I've described here, you did it to the best of your ability and no idea, nothing came up. I'm guessing what you got wrong is step one. Your boundaries are either too wide or too narrow. Adjust them and resume with step two. And then yes, you'll have to go through the other three steps, but it'll be quicker and easier this time because you're building on the work you've already done.

Now, another issue you could end up with is too many ideas. You can end up with a bunch of competing ideas. Needless to say, this is a problem you want. Matter of fact, if you keep coming up with ideas, you'll develop a library of ideas and you can only execute a limited number of them.

So that's how you get ideas. Now, how long should this entire process take, all four of the steps?

You are doing this while working and living your life. You're not doing this all day long. So how long this will take can vary a great deal. If you want to make something very small and specific, it could just be days. If you wanna make something big, could be months. That's what happened for me with Everything Is Remix. It took months.

There you have it. The four steps to getting an idea.

Bound, ingest, arrange, stop. Remember it as bias. It simply works.