How to Create a Creative

I came upon my creative process by accident.

My first day at Rock Candy Media, we were all gathered in the conference room to brainstorm ideas for an event a client was putting on. It was intimidating, as the rest of the core team was spitting out all kinds of stuff – whiteboarding and generally looking like you imagine an ad agency would look like.

It wasn’t what I expected. I figured that, as the lowest person on the totem pole, I wouldn’t be given access to creative meetings. But at RCM, everyone is a creative. Sometimes, our best ideas don’t even come from the “creative team,” sometimes they come from Scott, our lead developer.

However, I digress, it was my first day and I was super intimidated and therefore silent. I sat quietly as everyone pitched ideas and I noticed that Annie kept looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Eventually those looks turned into verbal admonitions, and eventually those verbal admonitions turned to Annie asking me every three minutes to say something.

I kept my cool—but I was laying in the cut, plotting.

Toward the end of the meeting, I pitched an idea. The idea worked. It was smart, it was funny and it was clever enough to get our client noticed. It ended up being the one that we pitched to the client.

In that meeting, I stumbled upon where I fit in RCM. In creative meetings, I’m generally pretty quiet. I’ll absorb everything that everyone else says and try to synthesize it and put my own spin on it. The trick is that I just work out every bad idea in my head, without vocalizing it, that way, when I finally do pitch something, I seem smart. It’s a genius play.