A Technique for Producing Ideas - the simple five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!

This is simply to get yourself a supply of those little 3 x 5 ruled white cards, and use them to write down the items of specific information as you gather them. If you do this, one item to a card, after a while you can begin to classify them by sections of your subject. Eventually you will have a whole file box of them, neatly classified.

an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

Once I jotted in a book the question: "Why does every man hope his first child will be a boy?" Five years later it became the headline and idea for one of the most successful advertisements I ever produced.

The second suggestion is that for storing up certain kinds of general material some method of doing it like a scrapbook or file is useful.

As you go through this part of this part of the process two things will happen. First., little tentative or partial ideas will come to you. Put these down on paper. Never mind how crazy or incomplete they seem: get them down. These are foreshadowing of the real idea that is to come, and expressing these in words forwards the process. Here again the

In advertising an idea, results from a new combination of specific knowledge about. products and people, will general knowledge about life and events.

So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are the source of all ideas.

In advertising, the specific materials are those relating to the product and the people to whom you propose to sell it.

"Go out into the streets of Paris," he was told by an older writer, "and pick out a cab driver. He will look to you very much like every other cab driver. But study him until you can describe him so that he is seen in your description to be an individual, different from every other cab driver in the world.h

The first of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material.