Where I Find My Inspiration
After begging with Ben Matthews to be tagged (he eventually stooped to tagging me as ‘Jeddy H’ something only three people in my life call me!) in Ged Carroll’s meme regarding where his inspiration for blog posts comes from. Since then loads of people have been tagged and loads of people have given really interesting answers – so now I’m going to expose my odd sources of inspiration!
I tend to find things in infrequent places, but the most common times for creativity are…
- My long drive home from work.
- To get to work I take a 135 mile round journey, I get some good time to think. Most of the time my ideas are born out of car/lane changing metaphors but sometimes these terrible analogies lead to me thinking of something that could be interesting. I work backwards from my metaphors, not towards them.
- My early morning bout with RSS feeds.
- This is sad. It’s 6:30am and my eyes have just opened, I grab my iPod Touch, switch on the Dolce Gusto coffee shotgun and sift through the RSS feeds that are new/missed/flagged and wake myself up. Then, after I’ve showered, changed, rechanged and eaten my banana, I drive to work and mull over any of the posts that have resonated with me.
- The interns at work.
- I opened up a debate about PR degrees last week, and something that I find really interesting is sitting down and talking with interns about what they think of PR from what they’ve learnt at university. As previously mentioned, I didn’t do PR so it’s great for me to talk to people from a different entry point – and plus, most of them are quite nice anyway.
- My non-PR friends.
- Sometimes the best ideas come from common sense. PR and social media people can often be too close (echo chamber anyone?!) to a subject to think properly about it – this is where my friends come in! I storm into the pub with a look of fury on my face and complain about something/someone/somewhere and they try and make sense of my stuttering industry worded rubbish and then give me common sense answers.
- Books that are made of paper and can be held in your actually hands.
- I love to read books, be it Wilde (not Kim, but Oscar) or Wikinomics, it helps to relax me and it helps to open up new ideas.
- Last, but not least, Twitter.
- Arguably the primary source of my posts. Often an idea is pitched to Twitter and a few people contribute, opposing and agreeing, and then I’ll go away, stew a bit, and then write it all up nice and proper.
And I’ll tag Giles Shorthouse, Robin Wilson and James Whatley.
The lovely (that’s my nice comment for the day done) people that have completed the meme and revealed themselves so far are…
Ged Carroll
Jonny Rosemont
Stephen Waddington
Tom Malcolm
Ben ‘Benny’ Matthews
Drew Benvie
Matthew Watson
Jaz Cummins
Lewis Webb
Adam Lewis