Strategygram: Being Inspired - The Four P's of Inspiration

There’s the story of a legendary professional—lauded by colleagues, loved by clients, lionised by citizens—who was asked by a reporter at his seventy-fifth birthday celebration: “Of all the people you’ve known, who do you miss the most?”

Swift and sure came the reply: “The person I miss the most is the person I used to be; I miss my spirited self.”

That inspired self: have you ever missed it, whether you are 25…or 45…or 65…or whatever age you are now?

As a strategist, you shape inspiring brands and campaigns, and you inspire teams, but how do you, the inspirer, stay inspired??

Inspiration to leapfrog in capability and performance, yes; but also to express what is waiting to emerge from within.??

And there we have the paradox of inspiration: you can’t control its appearance, but you can coax it.?

Conjuring strategy is a creative act, so we ask ourselves: how do other professionals who also depend on creativity for their living encourage and enable the arrival of the Muse? How do these professionals leverage what we’ll call here The Four P’s of Inspiration?

For the famed art director and designer, George Lois, an exemplar of the creative leader for the hit television serial?Mad Men—when Lois was at a party for the show, Matthew Weiner, the creator of?Mad Men, blurted, “You don’t know how much you mean to our show!” and lead actor Jon Hamm ran after Lois, gushing, “This is the most thrilling night of my life”—the?place?for Lois to go to for inspiration was the museum. Lois, who died recently at age 91, visited a museum every week for over 60 years.?

According to George Lois: “Lou Dorfsman, design chief for CBS Radio and later for the CBS Television Network for over 40 years, once said, ‘In reality, creativity is the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.’ However, nothing comes from nothing. You must continuously feed the inner beast that sparks and inspires.

I contend the DNA of talent is stored within the great museums of the world. Museums are the custodians of epiphanies and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and the deep recesses of the mind.

My wife is an artist who paints under the name Lewandowski-Lois. Our spiritual day of worship is spent each Sunday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we experience, without fail, the shock of the old.

When in London, we go to the British Museum; in France we visit the Louvre; in Madrid we go to the Prado; you get the idea. Mysteriously, the history of the art of mankind can inspire breakthrough conceptual thinking, in any field.”

These epiphanies—“the shock of the old”—ignited ideas for George Lois. For instance, in the year-long exhibition at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) that showcased how George Lois “changed the face of magazine design with his covers for?Esquire?magazine” was that iconic 1967 magazine cover featuring Muhammad Ali pierced with arrows—a metaphor for the U.S. government’s persecution of that boxer as a conscientious objector who refused to be drafted for the Vietnam War. The impulse for the magazine cover, George Lois tells us, came from Francesco Botticini’s fifteenth century painting,?Saint Sebastian, displayed in the Metropolitan Museum.

George Lois exploited what Rosamund Harding termed as?fringe ideas, that is, “ideas on the periphery of the thinker’s particular inquiry, but resonant in tone and thus able to enhance and flow into the creative process.”?

In 1942, Harding, a music historian, published a slim book called?An Anatomy of Inspiration in which she sought to reverse-engineer the mechanisms of creativity by examining the recorded experiences—diaries, letters, autobiographies, eye-witness accounts—of famous creators across the arts and science: from Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, through Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Immanuel Kant, to Louis Pasteur and James Watt.

In Rosamund Harding’s analysis, “many ideas outside the subject become associated with it by a kind of interest association and acquire a similar tone. Thus they tend to become available at the same time as the ideas directly connected with the subject itself. The variety of interests tends to increase the richness of these extra ideas—‘fringe-ideas’—associated with the subject and thus to increase the possibilities of new and original combinations of thought.”

A museum is self-evidently a conspicuous cornucopia of diverse and dramatic stimuli but to the discerning eye and a receptive sensibility can even a humble countryside yield generative possibilities? Does inspiration depend only on what’s out there or also reciprocally on what’s in here?

In Vincent van Gogh’s letter of July 15, 1888 to a young friend and fellow painter, émile Bernard, van Gogh narrates:?

“Listen, one of the first days after I came to this spot I talked to a painter friend of mine, who said, ‘How boring it would be to do this.’ I didn’t say anything, but I thought it so astounding that I didn’t even have the strength to give that idiot a piece of my mind. And I am still going there, over and over again. All right! I have done two drawings of it—of that flat landscape, where there was nothing but…infinity—eternity.

All right! While I was drawing, there came along a fellow who is not a painter but a soldier [Milliet]. I said to him ‘Does it amaze you that I think this as beautiful as the sea?’

Now this fellow knew the sea. ‘No, it doesn’t amaze me,’ he said, ‘that you think this as beautiful as the sea, but I myself think it even more beautiful than the ocean; because it is inhabited.’

Which of the two spectators was more of an artist, the first or the second, the painter or the soldier? Personally I prefer the soldier’s eye—am I right or not?”

Another fecund source of inspiration is—and will always be—people.

Sometimes it’s a person’s entire body of work that stirs us. The much-admired graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister confesses: “There are people that I find inspiring. Paula (Scher of Pentagram), for one. You know, being able to pull something like that off for over thirty years, you know to stay relevant. You can count those people on one hand. And you know, the strangest thing is, if I would have to elect my favourite work of hers, it was one from last year. I mean that is amazing! I would love to be in the position after thirty years of work to say my best piece was from last year.”

Sometimes it’s a person’s personality that lubricates the imagination. Phil Collins’ favourite song for Genesis and the band’s only number one hit in the U.S.—Invisible Touch—proclaims the mystery of a woman who is wonderfully rapturous and woefully ruinous. That song, Phil Collins acknowledges in his autobiography, was based on his first wife, Andrea Bertorelli. (The autobiography also informs us that Collins paid forty-two million pounds in divorce settlements to his three ex-wives. Sometimes, inspiration costs.)?

What about those happenstance interactions with people, those moments of pure serendipity??

Remember that song about a guy whose girl friend dumps him for someone else—“I got up to wash my face, when I come back to bed someone’s taken my place”—but she later comes back to him—“Jubilation, she loves me again.” How did the hit song?Cecilia?walk into Paul Simon’s life?

In the summer of 1969, after a late-night party, a few friends were goofing around in the living room of the L.A. home where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were staying. “We were all pounding away and playing things,” recalled Simon in a?Rolling Stone?magazine interview. “That was all it was.?Tick a long, tick a tick a tong, tuck a tuck a toong, tuck a...”?

Once the guys had some sort of spontaneous rhythm going, someone switched on a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder lying in the room. “Once we put on the reverb button,” Art Garfunkel remembers in director Jennifer Lebeau’s documentary,?The Harmony Game, “it gave you a kickback on every sound, loud and pronounced, and the kickback was a good quarter of a second. So you could play your Levi’s on your thighs with your hands, as Paul and I did, into that rhythm and work out a little pattern which has an accentuation to it.”

Meanwhile, “Paul’s brother, Eddie, was giving us a solid four-four on the piano bench because it was just a little cushy –?dhump, dhump, dhump. Stewie Scharff, our friend from the East, played a junkie guitar that was around the house, and with its strings tuned out and he gave you a?putchuk putchuk aaa, putchuk putchuk aaa,?that was a wonderful quirky spike in our pattern. We did that all night long, or for a couple of hours.”

The improvisation became an earworm for Paul Simon. “Every day I’d come back from the studio, working on whatever we were working on, and I’d play this pounding thing.” He felt there was a minute-and-fifteen seconds section in the home recording that, if put on a loop, could be the backbone of a nice song track. “So then I said, ‘Let’s make a record out of that.’ ”

He talked to his producer, Roy Halee, who added some reverb to the track as well as the sound of drumsticks falling on the parquet floor of Columbia Records’ studio and later even included a processed version of Paul Simon playing the xylophone.?

“The lyrics were virtually the first lines I said: ‘You’re breakin’ my heart, I’m down on my knees.’ They’re not lines at all, but it was right for that song, and I like that. It was like a little piece of magical fluff, but it works.”

Cecilia, featured on Simon and Garfunkel’s?Bridge Over Troubled Waters?album, climbed to the number four position on the?Billboard Hot 100?and reached the number one slot on the?Cash Box Top 100. The song was not only popular in several other countries but many artists recorded cover versions of the song over the next fifty years.?

Critics have referred to Christoph Niemann as “the world’s best illustrator”. Niemann is a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has featured on the covers of?The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired,?and?The New York Times Magazine,?who has won prestigious awards from AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) and American Illustration, who is an inductee in the Art Directors Club’s Hall of Fame, and who has done unusual live-drawing events such as sketching the New York City Marathon while running in it.

A few years ago, Niemann came to the conclusion that “the reputation that brought me assignments was: ‘We can call him when we don’t know what to do.’ I was a bit like the fire department” but he also realised: “When you do any kind of creative job for a while, you become better but I think you always become a little bit more predictable.”

“Imagine you’re a doctor who specializes in difficult surgeries,” he says in an interview with?The Creative Independent.?“You excel 500, even 1,000 times. Everyone’s happy that you do this one thing perfectly well every time. If you’re a soccer pro and you score every penalty—happy days! However, in our world, if you scored a perfect penalty, you can never kick it the same way. If you’ve written a novel, the next one has to be different. Even if it’s slightly similar, they’ll say you’ve run out of ideas. The great thing about our job is, you can do new things all the time. The curse is, you have to do new things all the time.”

Reflecting on the work that he was doing, Niemann noticed that a lot of his good material was derived from what he had learnt from his own?playful?experiments. So he asked himself, “Wouldn’t it be prudent to set aside a sizable chunk of quality time to experiment today?”

For client-commissioned work, Niemann always starts with a punchline and then works back to a visual. For his experimental work—his playful exploration of where his curiosity pilots his creativity—Niemann decided to do the opposite.?

He’d randomly choose an object—a couple of bananas, a paper clip, a pair of Apple earphones, his wife’s wedding shoe—and then, by “taking a line for a walk” (Paul Klee’s dictum)—he’d turn that object into an image of something completely different—the bananas looked like the hind legs of a horse, the paper clips resembled a beach chair, the earphones transformed into a mosquito, the wedding shoe morphed as a shark.?

He called these?Sunday Sketches?and began publishing them in?The New York Times Magazine.

Sunday Sketches?are “an exercise in seeing,” Niemann says. “The greatest challenge is freeing myself from the actual function of the object.…I always started with an object with absolutely no idea of what the outcome would be.…what I found with these drawings is when you accept that when you give up control and you really throw yourself into the uncertainty, there’s actually another level of work that can be very satisfying.”

“It’s not about having a goal but instead about thinking, Where does that object take me? I could take a photo of that chair and probably turn it into a reasonably good giraffe. But that is of course predictable.…Editing, editing, editing. I always want to make something so that at the end it feels like that was the only possible solution. Inevitability.…A big goal of my work is that in the end, the results look like there was no alternative, as if things would have just fallen down from the sky—just like that. It sometimes still fools me, sometimes I think it has to happen like that.”

Does inspiration depend on talent? “I don’t really believe in inspiration that comes from sitting at the desk,” says Niemann in an interview with?Forward?magazine. “It always comes with working.” (Which is reminiscent of Picasso’s view: Inspiration exists, but somehow she visits me only when I am working.)

Niemann amplifies that thought—inspiration comes because you are working, not just waiting—in an interview with?NPR: “The one thing that I sometimes take somewhat offense to—and I know it’s a figure of speech but—this idea of talent. When people say: Oh, you’re so talented. I could never do that. I always feel like: No. When you listen to a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata…you would never say: Oh, I couldn’t do that [because of talent. It’s] because, well, you didn’t sit down for 10,000 hours and practice.”

One talented person who put in more than the requisite 10,000 hours of practice was Salvador?Dalí. Early in his career, he strove to make an impact in the world of art using several techniques—Impressionism, Pointillism, Futurism, Cubism, and Neo-Cubism—but couldn’t with any of them because they were all techniques that had already been masterfully demonstrated by other artists. It was only when?Dalí?found a?product?that infused him with a new point of view that his achievements and fame soared.

That product was a book,?The Interpretation of Dreams?by Sigmund Freud.?Dalí?cherished it as one of the “capital discoveries” of his life. In fact,?Dalí?was so inspired by Freud’s discoveries about dreams and the subconscious, that when?Dalí?visited Vienna, the city of his hero, he fantasised: “I held long and exhaustive imaginary conversations with Freud; he came home with me once and stayed all night clinging to the curtains of my room in the Hotel Sacher.”?

(Dalí?did eventually meet Freud years later, in 1938. On that occasion, when?Dalí?went over to Freud’s home in London, he sketched the famous psychoanalyst and that?Portrait of Sigmund Freud?now hangs in the Freud museum in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, the last home of the psychoanalyst.)??

Dalí?is probably most well known for his painting?The Persistence of Memory—where clocks are “melting like Camembert cheese in the sun”—but many of his other masterpieces too reflect his interpretation of Freud’s theories about psychodynamics.?

Dalí?referred to his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs” because the surreal, dream-like scenes were depicted with such meticulous precision in detail as if to give the viewer the impression that the unreal image was real. No wonder he declared: “I am the Don Quixote of unreality.”?

The late Milton Glaser, who hastily jotted his inspiration for the ‘I (heart) NY’ logo with a red crayon on a torn envelope during a taxi ride in New York City, advised: “When you go through life not paying attention to inspiration or to your subconscious or conscience, eventually it withers. One of the things one would deduce from that is, ‘Use it or lose it!’ Meaning that if you start using your conscience and your inspiration, there is more possibility of it staying with you. But if you abandon inspiration by becoming cynical or indifferent, it goes away. Because the conditions for being inspired are conditions of receptivity.?

It’s not susceptible to the will, you can’t ‘make’ yourself be inspired. You have to put yourself in a state of mind that allows inspiration to occur. It’s opposite of willfulness, right? So that’s why inspiration comes when it wishes instead of when you want it to. And that’s why you’re sitting in the bathtub or about to drop off to sleep when suddenly the answer comes.?

So you must have faith in it. One of the difficulties of dealing with all spiritual phenomena is that in every case they are not susceptible to control. You have to put yourself in a state which allows it to happen.”

There you have it: the?Four P’s of Inspiration—places, people, play, products—spout surprising stimuli that smack your thinking off its ho hum trajectory and shunt it into the wow one.?

The force multiplier of expertise is always creativity, which is why for the strategist inspiration is the elixir that rejuvenates passion, revitalises power, remodels performance.?

Been inspired lately?

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘The Four P’s of Inspiration’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image.?

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts.??

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