A curation of big brain insights by Josh Belhumeur, Creative Director at BRINK, the agency for activist brands. See more at BRINK.com.

1. WHERE
CREATIVITY
COMES
FROM
A curation of big brain insights
by Josh Belhumeur.

2. 2
Creativity is the process of
making something both
novel and useful.
- Rex Jung

3. 3
STOLEN FROM
And a few other places.

4. 4
THE FRAMEWORK
Consumption Constraints Conditions
+ +
Fill your brain
with insights.
Create a sandbox
to play in.
Maximize the chance
for ideas to surface.

5. 5
THE FRAMEWORK
Consumption Constraints Conditions
+ +
Fill your brain
with insights.
Create a sandbox
to play in.
Maximize the chance
for ideas to surface.

6. 6

7. 7
At a video rental store in Phoenix, customers would line up to
talk to an 18-year old named Ted. Ted was a walking
encyclopedia of film knowledge because he had consumed so
much of it his whole life. He always had the perfect
recommendation depending on your tastes and sensibilities.
That was Ted Sarandos who is now the Chief Content Officer
at Netflix. He still watches 4 hours of movies and TV a day
because his job is to recognize good ideas out of hundreds of
pitches. He does this through an attuned cultural awareness.

8. 8
Our brains are
fundamentally great
at one thing above
all else: pattern
recognition.

9. 9
Our brains are not so different from modern AI such as Midjourney, we
have to train ourselves with data points before we can conjure unique
and creative thoughts.

10. 10
Adjacent
Possible

11. 11
Once you train your brain, next you are seeking an adjacent
possible.
Think of a house that magically expands with each door
you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each
leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those
four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open
one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new
doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you
couldn’t have reached from your original starting point.
For example, when our ancestors evolved opposable
thumbs, they opened up a whole new cultural branch of the
adjacent possible: the creation and use of finely crafted
tools and weapons.

12. 12
Did you know? Sunspots were
simultaneously discovered in 1611 by
four scientists living in four different
countries. The telephone, telegraph,
steam engine, photograph vacuum
tube, radio—just about every essential
technological advance of modern life
has a multiple lurking somewhere in
its origin story.
Good ideas are not conjured out of
thin air; they are built out of a
collection of existing parts, the
composition of which expands the
adjacent possible.

13. 13

14. 14
What do Ben Franklin and Aaron
Sorkin have in common?
They both claim to have become
exemplary writers by imitating great
works, deconstructing the patterns
that made them great then doing a
sort of Mad Libs approach to practice
the mechanics behind them.

15. 15
20%
Principle
Spend 20% of
your time
consuming the
ideas and works
of others.

16. BRINK.COM 16
You can’t have insights
about things you know
nothing about.

17. 17
THE FRAMEWORK
Consumption Constraints Conditions
+ +
Fill your brain
with insights.
Create a sandbox
to play in.
Maximize the chance
for ideas to surface.

18. 18
START WITH
A MIND MAP
Follow conceptual
connections
between themes to
help create new
threads.

19. 19
IMAGINE A WORLD…

20. Develop a mixer for your creative cocktail.
20
What if Frida
made this?
What if Tarantino
wrote this?

21. 21
THE FRAMEWORK
Consumption Constraints Conditions
+ +
Fill your brain
with insights.
Create a sandbox
to play in.
Maximize the chance
for ideas to surface.

22. 22

23. 23
McCartney composed the entire melody of Yesterday in a
dream one night. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and
played the tune to avoid forgetting it.
Initially concerned though if he had subconsciously
plagiarised someone else's work, as he put it: "For about a
month I went round to people in the music business and
asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually
it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if
no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it."
It took him 2 more years to actually finish the song.

24. 24
Aha! Iterate
then
first

25. 25
Aha moments are a burst of
gamma band originating in
the right side of the brain.
A subconscious process.

26. 26

27. 27
Collisions are when external
triggers or internal combinations
awaken your unconscious brain
to get to an aha moment.

28. 28
Legend of MIT Building 20
A temporary structure built in haste during WWII,
this building became a messy space for great
innovation.
Noam Chomsky pioneered modern linguistics
and generative grammar. It was home of Tech
Model Railroad Club, where many aspects of
what later became the hacker culture developed.
It housed research performed by acoustics
pioneer Leo Beranek and Amar Bose, who
founded the Bose Corporation. Radar pioneers,
analog circuit design, high speed photography,
and the list goes on.
The biggest reason why? Collisions.

29. 29
Creativity happens when
curiosity meets serendipity.

30. 30
D
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F
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&
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BIG
IDEA
CONCEPT EXECUTION
ITERATE & FEEDBACK!
GO WIDE!

31. 31
01 Spend considerable time consuming
great creative work specific to your
discipline.
02 Deconstruct great work: What is it
doing? Why is it great? Find the structure
and mechanics behind it.
03 Emulate the work or style of work mad
libs style as a form of sharpening your
creative capacity.
04 Begin a new task as a sponge. Absorb
everything you can about the context and
culture of where your ideas exist.
05 Create (or rely on) guardrails that keep
you focused on usefulness while having
space for novelty.
06 Use artificial constraints as “kickers”
and create mind maps to explore creative
territories.
07 After putting in the work to fully
understand it, seek moments to foster an
unconscious Aha!
08 Collaborate often, talk through ideas,
show works-in-progress, test with diverse
audiences, and iterate iterate iterate.

32. 32
Connect on LinkedIn
Email me: josh@brink.com