Holman + Hunt Creative Director Richard Holman has some questions about your own creative process, and you would be wise to consider them the next time you are mired in a project, looking for a way to battle through it.

“To be a successful creative you have to constantly change your ways of seeing the world,” Holman told a standing-room-only crowd at PromaxBDA: The Conference on Wednesday, then proceeded to deliver a lighthearted collage of queries and clips designed to do exactly that. Along the way, he deconstructed long-held notions of what the creative process is, such a the nature of idea-making itself.

“Do you have ideas, or do the ideas you have, have you?” Holman wondered, then showed an animated video set to audio of David Lynch comparing ideas to fish. “You don’t make fish, you catch fish,” Lynch says in the short. “There are trillions of and zillions of ideas ready to be caught.”

Rather than forcing ideas through strenuous effort, sometimes the best solution is to relax and “put yourself in the right state to receive them,” Holman said.

But then, it can be hard for us to relax and be in that state as adults because we are constantly afraid of screwing things up.

“When was the last time you made a mistake?” Holman asked the crowd. “The older we get the more fearful we get of making them, but as kids it’s how we learn about the world.” Mistakes are bricks in the road to discovery and when we avoid them, that road shortens considerably. They can take us farther than we ever dreamed possible, and even lead to something we never even expected. Penicillin, for instance, “was discovered by mistake,” Holman said.

Sometimes, mistakes happen better when we reconsider our angle of approach to a project.

“Which comes first, the medium or the message?” Holman asked, referencing a clip of renowned Beatles producer George Martin discussing the band’s seminal album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Ultimately, Martin said, the record’s profound innovation was derived from a collective goal to “put something on tape that had never been put on tape.”

“To put something on tape that had never been put on tape,” Holman echoed. “Are you fully exploiting the possibilities of the medium you’re working in? Next time try putting the medium before the message and see what happens.”

You might also ask yourself “if you are adding or taking away” from a project, Holman said, expressing a fervent belief in the power of carving work down to its most basic elements. “Ask yourself, ‘Is this the absolute essence of my idea expressed as concisely as possible?’” he said.

If all else fails, you can always steal. Picasso said that good art copies while great art steals, but you have to be sneaky about it. Holman doesn’t recommend stealing from within your own line of work, for example. On the contrary, “explore ideas in other areas and reinvent them in your own work,” he suggested. “Expose yourself to the best things humans have done.”

It’s important to keep questioning your own creativity, and what it means to be a creative.

“If you want to change the way you think forever,” Holman said, pairing his own presentation down to its absolute essence, “then you have to be forever changing the way you think.”

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