Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide

by John Cleese

This is how I began to discover that, if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with. It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle. I began to think to myself, “It can only be that while I’m asleep, my mind goes on working at the problem so that it can give me the answer in the morning.”

Well, people who are stronger-minded than me seem to be able just to bat these thoughts away. Lucky sods. I can’t do that. Instead, I write them down straight away on a yellow sticky note on my desk. Then I can forget about them.

Reference Getting Things Done

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.” This insight helped me to view my fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones, and therefore as an inseparable part of the whole creative process.