I think we can all agree, if there’s one thing we can thank the internet for, it’s the rise of the inspirational quote. Whose day or week isn’t enhanced by someone posting an image telling us to Live, Love, Laugh over a pink and purple sunset?

by James Morton

But dig beyond the bland and the banal, and there’s a whole world of words, wit and wisdom that do warrant our time and consideration.

And boy are we spolit in the world of comms and creativity. Authors, poets, inventors, philosophers, entrepreneurs – they’ve all mused on the roots and reasons behind creative pursuits.

Here’s five that offer inspiring insight that is unignorable for creative communicators.

1. “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.”
Dorothy Parker

Process. Strategy. Planning. Hardly words to get the pulse racing or that you would instantly associate with incredible creative output. But behind great creativity tends to lie a far less glamourous bunch of building blocks. Without this scaffolding and foundations, there is nothing to build creativity on. Ideas infrastructure, if you like.

2. “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou

The pursuit of the key message can become a vortex down which any comms or campaign can gurgle and glug. And it can distract from the thing we really need to remember – if we’re going to encourage people to act on or engage with a campaign, we have to make them feel something. Our brains are wired to be far more responsive to a request if it has experienced emotion first. So don’t get so hung up on ‘what’ or ‘how’ – get to the ‘why’ at the heart of a campaign.

3. “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein

The quote that is probably unwittingly paraphrased and used by exasperated comms pros on almost every day of every week. The eternal pursuit of plain English from Helen in HR and jargon-free jabbering from Olly in Operations goes on. If we can’t get them to clearly spell out what the hell they’re taking about, what hope has anyone else got?

4. “Write drunk, edit sober”
Ernest Hemingway

The fatal mistake when it comes to generating creative ideas for comms and campaigns is striving for the perfect solution from the start. Flip it – it’s about quantity, not quality, at the beginning. Research shows that the pouring out of ‘bad’ ideas is crucial in unearthing the gold beneath. It’s where Dorothy Parker’s ‘wild mind’ can go to town before sobering up and settling on the most appropriate.

5. “Creativity is just connecting things.”
Steve Jobs

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the creator of the iPhone managed to boil creativity down to something so simple. Mastering the mindset of connection can fuel creativity like nothing else. Could one thing be reused or repurposed as another? Could a random object be used to inspire an original campaign idea? Could inspiration be taken from an approach used elsewhere? Switch your creativity notifications on and everything becomes a source of inspiration.

Can these quotes really be put into practice in our comms and campaigns? Yes! Learn how in the Creative Campaigns for the Public Sector course in the Alive Academy. comms2point0 visitors can use code C2P0100 for £100 off the course.

James Morton is communications consultant at Alive with Ideas. You can say hello on Twitter at @MortyJMo

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