In Berlin a restaurant opens for anorexics and in Buffalo a lawyer with a stutter wins a court case. When everything you're working on has gone STALE and your own initially promising concepts are starting to annoy you, you need a brainstorming session to get to the missing bits or generate some new ideas.
The papers provide ample ideas for jump starts. A stutterer in a court case or an anorexic going to a restaurant that has opened especially for them must have no problems with ideas to keep them going for at least two weeks after their memorable experiences.
Brainstorming is trix galore, right? But that's really nothing new. Our mind plays on us all the time, wherever we are, whatever we do. It thinks of a stutter as its rightful body. Or of the numb anorexic craving as its self in top form.
The mind's always on a mission. Always. When faced with putting together a magazine-type product, a sales promotion concept, a new hype of some sort. It's the mind, that comes up with everything.
When brainstorming, think of the stutterer. At all cost, do NOT work on losing the stutter if you wanna speak. It's only obstructing and keeping you from the ideas labeled 'good' in the recesses you're trying to access.
Material to work with? Anything, so long as it is not defined. Space for now. Goal to achieve? An arrival point.
Very often the best ideas are the ones born in the early seconds of a session. Here at contentClix, we call it 'performance brainstorming'. Trust your instinct rather than the treacherous mind and your first utterances prove most valuable.
What DO we get at when we get at what we normally miss out on? And DO we miss out? Or does what we can't afford to miss out on catch up with us anyway?
Days that we are opening restaurants for anorexix are here. Really, since last December. How about launching something with a statement. Something like "Soon, human beings don't have to think anymore and they'll still be thinking". Sounds like a reproach to technology - it's also been said 1,000 times of poetry.
So we live in days that a restaurant caters for anorexics. A real-life manifestation of something we think of as an unviable concept made into a commercial venture, a marketable concept.
We really are so overmarketed in our entertainment that this new theme restaurant probably doesn't even stand out any more. We can go around feeding anorexics and the poor girlies probably won't feel in any way forced to eat. Solves their problem by creating a new layer in indifference on a wider scale.
Perhaps this is a consolation for those girlies with enough energy left to be on the lookout for healthier anger ventilation opportunities: of the stutterers, 80 is male.
The mind's mission RIGHT NOW is getting on target. Do you feel it coming? The next thought you're likely to produce is something to do with doing your very best and losing a stutter. A marriage of idea and form! Perhaps we nearing some arrival point.
Angelique van Engelen runs http://www.contentClix.com, a copywriting agency in Amsterdam. She has lived and worked as a journalist in the Middle East and London for over six years and currently lives in the Netherlands.