A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young

Written by an advertising man in the 1960s, this book is his response to a question asked to him: "How do you get ideas?". This is a deceptively simple book - it can be read in under an hour and seems straightforward on the surface, but is the result of years and years of the author's experience of watching ideas develop... in turn, it will require work and time for anyone to put the technique into practice.

An idea is nothing no more nor less than a new combination of old elements... [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.

From the outside looking in, watching anyone come up with an idea tends to seem like an instant "Eureka!" moment sprung right off the top of their heads. But rarely do have the opportunity to see all of the time and effort that went into working up to this moment. Young presents this as a 5 step process:

1. Gather the raw materials
2. Digest these materials in your mind
3. Incubate these materials subconsciously
4. Eureka!
5. The final shaping of the idea to something that is useful.

The more we grow in our experience in our chosen field, the more we build our store of steps 1-3, and that is why step 4 can seem to come so effortlessly to highly experienced people.

This book makes me think of a great story about Picasso, which varies in its details with every telling of it I can find, but the meat of it is that:

Picasso was sitting in a diner when a patron approached him and asked for a sketch on a napkin. Picasso quickly draw him a sketch, and asked for a million dollars in return. "A million dollars?!" the patron exclaimed, "for something that look you 30 seconds?" Picasso replied, "yes, but it took me 40 years to learn how to draw that in 30 seconds."