Translator: Mika Fukasawa Reviewer: Denise RQ
So, how many of you have ever had a good idea?
It's the worst thing that ever happened, right?
I feel whenever I had a good idea,
it's amazing, but it's also very scary,
because I can't control when it happens.
I feel very --
Every good idea I've ever had
I've been convinced is the last good idea I'll ever have,
and it feels like an actual miracle.
I find this a very stressful way to live.
I don't like just having to wait for it.
I think with good ideas you can't just will them into existence,
they don't keep regular office hours,
you can't just be like, "Today is the day I find the idea."
As someone who has to do this for a living, it does drive me crazy;
so I was trying to figure out if there is a way
that if you could make the process more systematic,
if there's any way to harness it.
I don't think there is a way to figure out when the ideas will come,
but maybe you can figure out where the ideas come from.
I want to start by telling you about an idea that my friend Noel had in 2003.
He was living in Virginia, and he was working for an ad agency,
and everyone there wanted to work on really flashy ads;
by Apple and Gatorade;
what was not flashy at the time was insurance.
They definitely didn't want to work on insurance.
There was this company that no one heard of, called Geico,
that wanted to do these online.
wanted to do a campaign about how to show
that it was really easy to sign up for their insurance.
All the copywriters feared this campaign, and literally, would run away
when they would see the clients and all,
and Noel must have not run fast enough.
He got caught; he must have come out of the bathroom maybe, and seeing the client;
and the Geico ad landed on his desk.
He was totally bummed, and he was stuck with this campaign.
So, he and his team would get together, and they would brainstorm
about how to make insurance not boring somehow,
and how to convey why it would be so easy to sign up for this service,
and none of the ideas seemed right.
They had an idea where they could have a baby that wasn't potty trained
but could still fill up the insurance forms;
it seemed very messy and not streamlined.
They were just like, brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm
and nothing was coming to them.
Then, when Noel got home --
He was reading this book by the writer George Saunders called "Pastoralia"
and he really liked this.
This made him feel really good.
The title story is about an amusement park;
it's set in no-time in this book.
The title story was in this amusement park,
and there are different exhibits to show how different people live.
There is a wise mountain hermit exhibit, and stuff like that.
and the main exhibit is--
- what the story focuses on - is about cavemen;
like a cave-husband and a cave-wife.
They are played by two actors, but they live in there;
they do everything; they never leave.
They eat, they sleep; their actual lives are playing these cavemen,
the cave-wife and the cave-husband.
It's a really funny great story, and Noel really liked it.
Then he would go back to work, and he'd try to figure out this campaign.
Everybody was just blocked; their brains needed to rest.
When they broke for lunch, Noel sat down to eat,
and suddenly, it just came to him.
He thought of the cavemen, and he said, "That's it!"
He thought, "It's so easy, a caveman can do it."
The whole slogan came to him fully formed, and he knew that was the right one.
Then that became the commercial
that you guys are probably all thinking of in your head right now.
It was like a good direct line
from reading this story to coming up with that campaign,
which I find amazing.
I felt, when I first saw that campaign, I never would have thought,
"Oh, George Saunders was inadvertently responsible for that."
I was like, "So, if George Saunders inspired that,
who is George Saunders inspired by?
What had inspired his inspiration?"
I called George Saunders up, to ask him,
and he was really great, and we talked a lot about inspiration.
He told me a story
about how, when he was first starting out as a writer,
he really only read dead authors.
He liked Hemingway, he liked Norman Mailer.
He would refuse to read any contemporary fiction;
anything that was written by someone alive he wasn't interested in.
He was sure he was right, and he could just dismiss that
with never have a look at it.
But then, one day, he was like, "I guess, if I'm going to say
that it is all terrible, I should read some of it."
So he decided to-- he had made this plan,
where he went to the Chicago Public Library.
he was living in Chicago, he went to the big library.
He took a stack of 15 journals.
His plan was that he would read all the journals, dismiss everything;
everything would be bad, and then he could go back
wanting to write like Hemingway again.
He opened up the first journal, and he read a story.
It was bad, and he was really relieved.
He was like, "Of course, I knew it."
Then he turned on to another story, and it was a story called, "Hot ice,"
by a writer named Stuart Dybek.
As soon as he started reading it,
George Saunders started to sweat, his face turned red.
He got really panicky,
and by the time he was done, something had changed.
That night, he went home and started writing
in the style that George Saunders -- actually, his style.
He found his voice that night after reading this story.
He said it was just like that.
It was instinct connection, direct line to inspiration.
I found that amazing, and I was,
"Well, I have to call Stuart Dybek then to see how far it goes."
So I called him up, and he was fishing at that time, and he was like,
"Yes, of course I have a moment of inspiration."
He said he was really obsessed with writing like the realists.
He likedº Saul Bellow and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
He writes these stories that are connected to reality,
but they're also fantastical.
He said that when he was 25
- he always wrote while listening to music -
and when he was 25, he went to the same library in Chicago;
exact same one that George Saunders would later go to.
He was really into these Hungarian composers named Kodály and Bartók,
and he checked out this recording they had done
called, "Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello."
He took it home, and he put it on.
And the minute the music played, he started writing furiously.
He filled three or four pages, and he looked down,
and he had written in a voice he didn't know he had,
in a style he didn't know he knew how to do.
He said the music instantly opened up everything for him,
and he became the writer that he became.
So that was very inspiring to me.
I would have called up more people,
but then, people started to not be alive any more.
So, I started to research and dig up stuff,
not bodies, just stories of inspiration.
It turns out that Kodály and Bartók
were really inspired by Debussy;
the composer Debussy.
And then, Debussy was really inspired by the poet Baudelaire,
and Baudelaire was extremely inspired by Edgar Allen Poe.
And Edgar Allen Poe actually-- "The Raven," right?
"The Raven" turns out to be inspired
by a bird in a Dickens's story called "Barnaby Rudge."
Poe hadn’t even liked it, he had panned it,
but he was super inspired by this bird.
That bird in that Dickens's story was actually inspired
by Dickens's real-life pet raven named Grip.
But Grip sadly died from eating paint chips,
before anyone could go on a record with what he was inspired by,
so it kind of ends there.
So, Geico to Dickens.
I felt, when I learned all this, the bad news is--
I guess there is no getting around the waiting for the inspiration to come,
but even though it doesn't make the creative process more easier to control,
it does make it feel less lonely,
because all these ideas are strung together through history.
And it also makes you feel like, "I'm living in an action movie now."
Like, "Watch out! Inspiration can strike at any second."
You just have to be ready to act on it when it does.
(Applause)