Twenty years doesn’t make ideas easier to find.
It changes how you recognise them.
Early in a career, an idea often feels exciting because it is new to you.
Later, you have seen enough to become suspicious of novelty for novelty’s sake.
You start asking different questions.
Is it relevant?
Is it true?
Does it belong to the brand?
Does it solve something?
Will people care?
Experience also changes your relationship with complexity.
You learn that a complicated idea is not necessarily a smart idea.
Sometimes the strongest work is the thing that removes complexity rather than adding it.
And perhaps the biggest change is this:
You stop needing every idea to be yours.
You become more interested in whether the idea is good.
That is a useful freedom.
Because creativity was never really about proving you are creative.
It was about finding something worth making.
