From a thought to an idea, and into something real

Give the thought some time

Someone says something that stays with you. You see a picture or hear a song, and there's a feeling you want to come back to. You might not even know why.

Then something else comes along. You talk to someone, try something completely different, or just leave it alone for a while. When you come back, the thought has changed a little.

That's what I mean by feeding a thought. Giving it something to grow from.

Say you're thinking about a new website for your business. Your first thought might just be: I want this to feel more like me. That's quite vague. But when you spend some time with it, things start coming up. How you talk to your customers. What you want people to see in your work. How the whole thing should feel.

If you go straight to choosing a website template, some of that might never get much thought.

The idea starts getting its own identity

At some point, you can start to picture what this could become. You can explain a little of it to someone else too.

Other thoughts start supporting the idea. One detail fits really well. Another looks nice, but doesn't quite belong here. You start making choices based on what you're looking for.

For me, this is where an idea starts getting its own identity. Your experiences, taste and thoughts become part of what you're making.

That's why I wouldn't decide everything in that first moment of excitement. A couple of days later, you might find the thing that makes it feel like yours.

Rick Rubin talks about this early stage too

In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin describes creative work moving through seeds, experimentation, crafting and completion. Talking about the book, he makes a useful distinction: the direction can stay open early on, but once you know what you're making, a deadline can help you finish it.

You could apply that to making a video. At first, you try different moods without locking down every scene. When you find a direction that feels right, you start putting it together and decide when you're going to finish.

That makes sense to me. Give the thought some room, but at some point you need to try it out. Otherwise you never get to see what it could actually become.

Trying it out shows you if the feeling is still there

The first version might look quite different from what you had in mind. That's part of it. Now you have something you can look at and change.

That process is called iteration. You make a version, notice something, and try again.

The feeling matters a lot to me here. Is the thing that made me want to do this still there? Or did I lose it while trying to make everything work?

Take a product video. Originally, you wanted to show one interesting detail. Then you add movement, text and effects, and eventually that detail gets lost in everything else. You've done more work, but you need to go back a bit and remember what caught your attention in the first place.

It doesn't have to feel good all the time. Sometimes a part of the work is just difficult. But if you still feel that this is something you want to make, it helps you keep going.

And of course, you need to see how other people experience it. If a customer can't follow the video, feeling good about it yourself doesn't solve that. You need to try another way to get the idea across.

With AI, we can start rushing too early

Something I keep thinking about with AI is how quickly we want to get from the first thought to the finished result.

You give the tool a thought, get a suggestion and start editing it. Change the colour a little. Shorten the text. Make it look more impressive. Without really noticing, you can end up polishing the first suggestion before your own idea has had time to form.

If you ask for a modern website, you might get something you like. But have you had time to think about what you want to say with it? Or what makes it feel like your business?

I'd like to leave some room for the thoughts that come a little later. The ones that might change the whole direction.

You can use AI for that too. Talk through something unfinished, ask questions and try different options. Every conversation doesn't need to end with a finished piece of text or an image.

Keep feeding the idea while you're making it

I think these stages overlap quite a lot. Making something gives you new thoughts. Those thoughts help the idea grow, and sometimes they make you change what you're doing.

So just pushing ahead isn't always enough. Sometimes it helps to stop, look at what you've made and give the idea something more. Talk to someone or leave the work alone for a bit.

Eventually, it becomes something real. Something you can show another person and come back to later. It exists outside your own head.

By that point, I want the work to still have the feeling it started with. Along with everything it picked up on the way. It can end up having much more character than you could have imagined at the beginning.