Playing With Purpose: Clear the Pipeline

Exercise 4 of the Playing With Purpose series

The Exercise

Set a timer for ten minutes. Grab a notebook, your phone, a napkin, it doesn’t matter. Write down every creative idea you currently have, every project you’ve been meaning to start, every thought about work or life or anything that’s been sitting in the waiting room of your brain. Don’t edit, don’t evaluate, don’t decide whether they’re good. Just get them out.

When the timer goes off, look at the list. Notice how many of the ideas feel obvious, the ones you’ve thought of before, the ones anyone might think of, the ones that come to mind first. That’s the low-hanging fruit. It’s not bad. It’s just in the way.

Now answer these:

The reflection questions:

• How often do you accept the first idea you have?
• Can you remember a time when you kept going past the obvious answer and landed somewhere surprising?
• What does the ten-minutes-of-fruit list reveal about what’s been occupying mental bandwidth?
• What might be behind the pipeline once the obvious stuff clears?
• What would it mean to practice this, not just once, but as a regular habit?

What I Learned When I Did This

I used to think I understood the blank canvas problem. As a design teacher, you watch students get an assignment and rush straight to the first decent idea they have, and you try to slow them down, to get them to generate more options before committing, because the first idea is almost never the best idea. I understood this in my students. It took me considerably longer to recognize how thoroughly it was running my own creative life.

I came across a research finding about ideation a few years ago, and it stopped me cold. In class after class, the exercise is the same: give people three minutes to generate ideas, then poll the room. How many of you thought of this? That? This? And the results are almost always identical. Most people in any given room arrived at almost exactly the same list. The obvious answers sit at the front of the pipeline, and they are the same obvious answers for almost everyone, because they’re the ones that life and shared experience and social conditioning have planted in the same spot in all of our brains.

The obvious answers aren’t wrong. They’re just the first layer. And the problem is that most of us stop there, because stopping there is faster and because the culture we operate in has trained us to reward whoever gets to the acceptable answer most quickly. Gold star, hero for the day, we’ve been over this. And so the interesting ideas, the ones that are actually yours and not just the statistical average of every human who’s faced a similar situation, they stay stuck behind the pile of obvious ones, waiting.

Morning pages, the Julia Cameron practice I’d read about years ago and didn’t fully appreciate until recently, are essentially a pipeline flush. You write three pages of whatever is in your head, not to produce anything worth reading, but to discharge the backlog. The obvious stuff, the mundane stuff, the repetitive thoughts that cycle without resolution, you write them out and they stop taking up space. And then other things start to come through. Not always, not immediately, but consistently enough that people who do it seriously will tell you the first thirty minutes of creative work after morning pages is qualitatively different from creative work without them.

I’m doing a version of this now without always calling it that, which is that I talk to my phone constantly. I talk while I’m driving, while I’m walking, at stoplights if an idea needs to get out before the light changes. Some of what comes out is junk, genuinely, and I know it while it’s coming out. But I also know that letting the junk move through is not a failure of the practice. It is the practice. You have to let the pipeline clear before you can see what’s behind it. And what’s behind it, in my experience, is almost always more interesting and more honest than the first thing I would have said.

There is a practical version of this I’d give to any student: before you start your next project, before you make a single decision about what it should be or how it should look or what direction you’re going in, spend fifteen minutes writing down every idea you can think of, no matter how bad, how obvious, how off-point. Fill the page. Then turn the page over and start working. The obvious stuff is gone now. You just bought yourself access to your actual thinking.

Playing With Purpose is a series of creativity exercises for people who want to understand and reclaim their creative capacity. You don’t need to be an artist. You need to be curious.