Early in my career, I thought creativity was about generating ideas.
More ideas meant more creative.
Twenty years later, I see it differently.
The harder part is recognising the idea worth pursuing.
Ideas appear everywhere.
In a conversation.
A behaviour.
A contradiction.
A cultural moment.
A strange product detail.
A problem nobody has articulated.
The creative job is partly about noticing.
And then knowing when something deserves attention.
Experience helps because you learn what usually doesn’t work.
You become less impressed by novelty.
You become more interested in relevance.
An idea doesn’t need to be complicated to be valuable.
It needs to reveal something.
Perhaps that is the quiet shift that happens with time.
You stop trying to prove that you can generate ideas.
You become better at spotting the ones that matter.
