The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time

by Allen Gannett

This element of bulk consumption is widespread across all creative industries. Connor Franta spent years watching countless YouTube videos. Great entrepreneurs consume trade and industry material en route to identifying their next lucrative business. José Andrés visits food and restaurant conventions to observe and absorb new techniques and get introduced to the latest ingredients.

Ted Sarandos’s experience working in a video store made it possible for him to understand what kinds of stories, formats, and structures his audience would perceive as similar to other movies they loved. By understanding where an idea would fall on the creative curve then and today, he was able to lead Netflix to incredible heights in original programming.

There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers, they are beautiful shapes.

As I went around interviewing creators, I found that the vast majority of them enjoyed these constraints. Chefs enjoy the science behind recipes. Musicians relish the challenge of writing a song no longer than three minutes. Structures, formulas, patterns, recipes, norms, and so forth aren’t a burden at all; in fact, they’re widely considered tools of the craft. Later I’ll explore in more detail why creators enjoy them, but first, let me raise a more fundamental question.

I talked to Ben Lashes, who has a particularly millennial job: He is a meme manager. He helps develop the careers of people (and animals) who, in the ever-churning blender that is the Internet, go viral. He also happens to manage the three most famous cat memes: Keyboard Cat (a cat who seemingly plays a piano keyboard), Nyan Cat (an animated cat whose body is a Pop-Tart), and, of course, Grumpy Cat (who, as you know, has a bad attitude).

makes it funny is the ten percent twist or what the caption is. That allows many more people to be content creators who otherwise may not have been because it’s a lot easier to remix an existing meme than it is to create a new one.” Memes, in fact, make it easy to create content in the sweet spot of the creative curve by prescribing a familiar structure.

What I call the Franklin method involves the careful observation and re-creation of the structures underlying successful creative work. Creators use the Franklin method to understand the formulas or patterns that have proven to be historically successful. Along the way they’re exposed to a baseline of familiarity that their audience would know. Then, on top of that structure, they can add novelty while maintaining the necessary familiarity. The Franklin method isn’t just a historic occurrence, or artifact. It’s still a critical part of understanding and mastering the creative process in a digital world.

Mathematics, it turns out, is a core element of writing a great pop song.

If you meet someone who is successful in a field you want to learn about, approach them. Be curious. Be relentless! As Wallach and others found out, most people are happy and willing to share their experience and knowledge. All you have to do is ask them.

“I like to meet people who are very smart, who know something about areas I don’t know,” says Rubenstein, adding, “I spend a lot of time asking them questions.” Like Wallach, Rubenstein has a question-based conversation style; he’s always pushing for more information. “It’s easy for me to ask people questions, and I like to find people who can tell me something I don’t know.”

The reason has to do with what academics call knowledge spillover. This is the process17 by which ideas are shared among people and institutions as they meet, network, and talk to one another. When an artist lets it drop to another artist that they have discovered a new technique, or a researcher mentions a new technology to an entrepreneur, the knowledge transfers—or spills—to another person in the network. In essence, the teaching process is ongoing and everlasting.

dueling perspectives make things better than if either one of them were working alone. “It’s not just meeting in the middle, it’s pushing forward so that instead of just moving on that horizontal plane, we’re moving vertically as well.”

For this reason, I call the ideal person to work with a conflicting collaborator. Basically, you don’t want to collaborate with someone who is so easy to get along with that they don’t push you. The goal is to find a person who will help you discover and overcome your flaws.

director, a producer who secured financing, not to mention a stellar cast of actors and singers. In

Instead, they are examples of what I call modern muses: people who provide material for a creator to use as well as practical motivation. For him, other comedians also serve this role. Kondabolu has found that when he spends time with other comedians, his passion increases. “When comedians hang out together, they have a certain energy around them.”

One thing Zuckerman found was that future Nobel laureates were 170 percent more productive during their twenties than the typical academic.

masters exercised noblesse oblige not only by lengthening the bibliographies of their young associates (granting them joint authorship) but often by heightening the visibility of the junior contributions to the research in arranging to have their names appear first in the list of authors.” In

Finding a prominent promoter may sound difficult—why would someone want to lend their credibility to you?—but studies tell us that not only do mentees benefit from these relationships, but promoters do, too.

The NYU team produced a second conclusion: Teams containing both established and up-and-coming people gain the same advantage as a person who leans to the middle.

These creative communities feature four types of individuals: A Master Teacher—This is the person who teaches you the patterns and formulas of your craft or industry, to ensure that you create things with the right level of familiarity, while also giving you the feedback you need to hone your craft through deliberate practice. A Conflicting Collaborator—Everyone has flaws. In order to make them nonfatal, you need to find a person or a group of individuals whose traits compensate for your flaws. A Modern Muse—A life of creativity often involves getting your soul slapped around. You need to surround yourself with people who will motivate and inspire you to persevere, who can be a source of fresh ideas and even friendly competition to push you toward achieving your very best work. A Prominent Promoter—To be a creative success, you need to be recognized as one. A prominent promoter already has credibility and is willing to share it with you. Not only does this benefit you, it also benefits the prominent promoter, who now has access to fresh ideas that help keep them at the right point on the creative curve.

is happening, driven largely by the dawning realization that producing films from and by women and people of color is, and always has been, great for business.”

Instead, I found out that making new ice cream is serious business at Ben & Jerry’s. I spent all day learning the four steps that Ben & Jerry’s uses to create the ideal new flavor. And as we’ll discuss, I couldn’t help but realize that this same process is used not just for making ice cream but for other types of creative endeavors I witnessed.

conceptualization, reduction, curation, and feedback.

This consumption allows the company to understand which ideas are on the early upswing of the creative curve.

In short, the Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Gurus, brand managers, and marketers do not trust their raw instincts. Instead, they recognize their goal is simple: to listen to their audience. It’s a deceptively simple paradigm, but one that’s easy for successful people to ignore as their confidence grows.

This is what I call the conceptualization stage, where creatives generate a set of plausible ideas.

Artists are traditionally reluctant to let others see their work before it is done. But great creatives—and great companies— know that the only way to consistently create in the sweet spot of the creative curve is by putting their work before an audience early and often. It is important to do this before investing in creation, narrowing your options to those that have a reasonable probability of success. From there, intuition and judgment usually govern the final choices.

This is the curation process. It is when you rely on people, either internally or externally, to give you qualitative perspectives. While the surveying done in the reduction stage is useful for getting in the right ballpark, you need to gather deeper context to confirm data and intuition.

When you think about it, the goal of any creative process isn’t just to create great results but also to improve the process itself. The processes themselves are a “product” that can be tweaked and enhanced. By improving these workflows, creative people not only come up with new ideas faster, they also have a higher likelihood of repeating their success.

Creative iterations are critical to making great products of all types. That is why before even starting, creative people need to understand where their ideas will be on the bell curve of popularity.

Jacobson loved it. “The idea of knowledge that was an endless spiral, and you could keep going deeper and deeper and you would never get to the end, you would never feel like you’d mastered it.”

“Oftentimes it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, it’s so extrinsic to the creative process to ask a bunch of consumers basically what they think,’ but we’re making movies for audiences, so it’s actually very helpful to know what they think.”

Across creative fields, data-driven iterations are critical to refining products and messages for the creative curve. In many industries, this requires the use of data, both to test audience response and to judge whether your effort was successful. By hitting the mark, most creative people gain confidence in their creative process. Miss the mark, and they know that somewhere along the line they made a faulty assumption.

The biggest secret to creating something your audience will love? Listen to them. The use of data-driven processes to refine ideas is the fourth and last law of creativity.

While this image of Rowling makes her a poster child for the inspiration theory of creativity, in truth Rowling is a near-perfect example of someone following the four laws of the creative curve.

“The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.”

Rowling took a traditional and familiar story structure—the orphan rising to greatness—and added her own twist: young wizards who are grappling with the complexities of growing up.

fifteen variations of the first chapter of book one alone, as well as a chart that included every single character in Harry Potter’s class at Hogwarts that Rowling used to develop her plots. It didn’t stop here. Rowling published on her website8 a plot table she created to plan her fifth book. On the left-hand side, she listed every chapter, followed by a column for each subplot, and a map that helped her organize how various plotlines would unfold throughout the book.

She didn’t just get struck by lightning. She didn’t win the creative lottery. She spent many years of her life reading, planning, and writing, and the result, of course, was and is Harry Potter.

Creative success, in fact, is learnable, whether you’re a starving artist or the head of an advertising firm.

The laws of the creative curve provide a blueprint for how every one of us can unlock our creative potential. The patterns of creative success can be learned and, with time, mastered.