When I was writing my first book, Design for Hackers, I developed a ritual. I would lay all of my research materials on the floor. Graphic Design history books were splayed out. I had research papers or articles printed out and stapled. There were highlights and sticky notes everywhere. In the center of all of this, I had a whiteboard. Well, it wasn’t actually a whiteboard. Whiteboards were too expensive. It was a piece of tile board -- tile board is what you would use for the wall inside of a shower. A whiteboard can go for more than $100. I bought this piece of tile board at The Home Depot for $11. It looked like a scene from a movie. I was the detective, trying to catch the killer. Where had the killer struck before? Is there a pattern to the killer’s behavior? Where will the killer strike next? My living room looked like a detective’s office. If a friend invited me out to do something, I would tell them a lie. I would say I couldn’t go out. But that wasn’t the lie. "Writing" doesn't always mean writing Saying I couldn’t go out while I was kneeling over my research material on my living room floor wasn’t the lie. I really didn’t have much time for socializing while writing my first book. The lie was that I would say that I was writing. In actuality, I would do little, if any, writing during this evening ritual. I might scribble a note here or there. I’d write one or two-word concepts on sticky notes, and arrange them on the whiteboard by feel. I’d draw lines amongst the sticky notes. I might even sloppily squeak an outline onto the whiteboard with a marker. But nothing I produced on these nights had any hope of showing up in my book. My computer was nowhere to be seen. I hid it in another room. Writing? I wasn’t really writing, per se. The speech that changed the way we see creativity In 1891, German scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz celebrated his 70th birthday. At the party thrown in his honor, he rose to give a speech. He reflected on his illustrious career. He had achieved one groundbreaking discovery after another. In physics, he formulated the concept of energy conservation. In art, he devised theories on color perception that influenced Impressionist painters. In medicine, he invented the ophthalmoscope. But Helmholtz was about to make one more contribution, this time to our understanding of creativity. He said: [Inspiration] comes quite suddenly, without effort, like a flash of thought. So far as my experience goes it never comes to a wearied brain, or at the writing-table. I must first have turned my problem over and over in all directions, till I can see its twists and windings in my mind's eye, and run through it freely, without writing it down; and it is never possible to get to this point without a long period of preliminary work. And then, when the consequent fatigue has been recovered from, there must be an hour of perfect bodily recuperation and peaceful comfort, before the kindly inspiration rewards one. Often it comes in the morning on waking up.... It came most readily...when I went out to climb the wooded hills in sunny weather. It wasn’t until years after I wrote my first book that I discovered this passage. But when I did, my experience writing that first book came back in a flash. Research becomes writing No, I wasn’t “writing” during these evening research sessions. Not in the sense that my fingers were moving on a keyboard, and that words were appearing on a screen. Yet I had come to learn that this work I had put in the night before would pay off the next day. The next morning, I’d amble across the creaky hardwood floor, sit down in a chair, and put my fingers on the keyboard. The notes from the night before were nowhere to be seen. The books were back on the shelf, the sticky notes were in the trash, and the whiteboard -- okay, tile board -- was erased and stowed away. I eventually learned that those nighttime research sessions made all of the difference. Even though my notes were