Good Thinking IS Creativity (And Other Things We Get Wrong About Our Best Ideas)

I don’t think everyone needs to be “creative.”

I realize that’s a borderline heretical thing to say in a field that launched campaigns from “Just Do It” to “Don’t Let 1984 be Like 1984.” But I’ve been sitting with this idea for a while now, and I think most of us have conflated creativity with something much broader… and frankly, more useful.

Discernment.

The ability to see a clear path through a thorny issue. To wake up with a next step that wasn’t there the night before. To sit in a conversation and suddenly know exactly what needs to happen. That’s not a brainstorm. That’s not a whiteboard full of sticky notes. That’s your brain doing its highest-level work, yet most people don’t give themselves credit for it because it doesn’t look like “creativity.”

Here’s the thing: I believe creativity can be developed in anyone. I genuinely do. But I don’t think it’s always the highest and best use of people’s time, especially in the workplace.

When someone says, “I’m not creative,” what they might actually be saying is, “This is not the way I process.” Or, “I don’t want to approach my very adult job with a mandated sense of childlike wonder.” And I think that’s a completely fair instinct to have.

What I want to challenge is the assumption that if you’re not having creative breakthroughs in the traditional sense—the big idea, the new concept, the jingle—then your thinking isn’t valuable. Because I watch people every day channel inspiration not through creative output, but through sharp decisions. Through seeing what others haven’t considered. Through managing a relationship with unusual precision or building empathy in a way that shifts the entire trajectory of a project.

That kind of thinking requires something more foundational than creativity. It requires self-knowing.

Know Your Rhythm, Trust Your Rhythm

What do I think matters more than being creative? Knowing when and how your best thinking shows up.

I’ve heard this described in so many ways, depending on the person. Shower thoughts. The ten minutes before bed. Dreams, even. Some people do their sharpest processing while exercising (I should probably test that hypothesis sometime). And some people think their clearest while in conversation with someone else. Their discernment lives in the exchange.

For me, whether I like it or not, it’s first thing in the morning. I wake up with clarity on something that felt impossible at 4 p.m. the day before. Just this week, I was preparing for a day of client meetings for a new campaign. I woke up with a tagline that felt right. Not because I’d been laboring over it, but because my brain had been processing it without my permission.

The pattern is remarkably consistent for me. And once I recognized it, once I stopped dismissing those early-morning thoughts as half-awake ramblings and started paying attention, the quality of my work shifted.

The Struggle Bias, Revisited

I wrote recently about what I call the Struggle Bias, the deeply ingrained belief that if work isn’t hard, it isn’t valuable. This is related.

When a sharp insight arrives without effort, we second-guess it. We think we need to suffer our way to the answer. And in a culture that still rewards the performance of busyness, the person who wakes up with a clear path forward can feel almost guilty about it. Where’s the grind? Where’s the late-night strategy session?

But the real skill isn’t forcing the insight. It’s recognizing the pattern of when it arrives, and building a system to catch it before it disappears. Because those thoughts will vanish. They always do. We move on to whatever is in front of us: the commute, the email, the question of what’s for breakfast or what the kids need for school. The insight doesn’t wait.

Build the System

This is the part that sounds simple but is genuinely transformative: build a way to capture what arrives.

A special notepad at your end table. A voice memo from the car or bed (my personal favorite… in fact, the thinking behind this very post started as a voice memo). A quick text to a colleague or friend. An email to yourself. Whatever works for you and whatever matches how you process. If you’re an internal thinker who needs to dwell before sharing, maybe it’s the notepad. If you process out loud, maybe it’s a call.

The system doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It needs to exist. And over time, something remarkable happens: the patterns become unmistakable. You begin to know when to expect your best thinking, and - maybe more importantly - when not to. You learn to protect those windows. You learn to give yourself grace during the lulls.

And eventually, you start to trust it. You trust that your brain is processing what it needs to process, even when you’re not actively wrestling with the problem. That the clarity will come. That when it arrives, however it arrives, it’s worth taking seriously.

Executive Clarity

The people I work with who move fastest aren’t necessarily the most creative. They’re the most self-aware. They know their rhythms, they trust their discernment, and they act on it.

While it may not be the “out of the box thinking” (blech) that corporate culture so often aspires to, it’s just as powerful: executive clarity. The ability to cut through noise, to make the decision that’s been waiting to be made, to articulate something complex with surprising simplicity. Not because you oversimplified it, but because you finally understood it.

That is creativity, if you ask me. It just doesn’t always look like it.

So here’s my challenge: start paying attention. Not to when you’re trying to think, but to when clear thinking finds you. Get familiar with that rhythm. Protect it. Build around it. And when it shows up, capture it before it slips away into the rest of your day.

I promise you: over time, the patterns will emerge. You’ll know when to look for it. And most of all, you’ll begin to trust yourself when that clarity of thought arrives.

That trust might be the most valuable thing you build all year. 

If you’re curious about what strategic marketing partnership can look like for your business, I’m always happy to talk. No one has ever accused