If you only read one thing.

• If you’re not micromanaging, you’re not leading: “Seeing the data raw instead of analytically pre-chewed can have enormous impact on executive perceptions.” | Harvard Business Review

Management.

• 3 lessons (and warnings) for agencies looking to emulate startups | Co.Create
• How Tim Cook is changing Apple | Fortune Tech

Innovation.

• “Great UI and UX are becoming the new IP. Thanks to the low cost of computing, these entrepreneurs find innovation in human behavior, not pure technology.” ‘Legendary’ angel investor Ron Conway on mega-trends, non-bubbles and more | Twilio

Technology.

• How I’m implementing responsive web design | JeffCroft.com
• The Facebook fallacy: For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web | Technology Review
• Five (intuitive) reasons to bet on Facebook | Logic+Emotion
• How Mark Zuckerberg hacked the Valley | Businessweek
• Facebook: a brilliant business model | Jeremiah Owyang
• The golden age of Silicon Valley is over, and we’re dancing on its grave | The Atlantic
• Arts and cultural organisations are exploring apps | WSJ.com

Insights.

• Planningness 2012 recap and trends in planning | Digilicious
• How Gatorade redefined its audience and a flagging brand | Co.Create
• From the archives: Why Gawker is moving beyond the blog | Lifehacker
• Machine beauty and our bionic future | Big Think
• “Reinventing yourself in this business ain’t easy, let alone getting a foot in the ‘Planning Department’ door.” Mark Pollard’s tips | Junior

Creativity.

• Hack the cover | Craig Mod
• Creative destruction: how advertising is swallowing the creative class | Gawker
• Advice to young designers | The Window Seat
• Web design manifesto 2012: “Thank you for the screen shot. I was actually already aware that the type on my site is big. I designed it that way.” | Jeffrey Zeldman

Trends.

• People want jobs that make a difference, even if it means a pay cut | Co.Exist

On Nextness this week.

• Lights, camera, action at the white agency.
• Nextness Visual Diary | COLOUR!

STW Group news.

• 43 questions and answers about Facebook Timeline | Ogilvy Public Relations Australia
• STW looks to Singapore for growth | The Australian

Ready for a close up.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKMyaJDJ9Qw

A new initiative at the white agency in 2012 has seen everyone participating in events that focus on specific disciplines across the agency. The idea is to help everyone understand the challenges, processes, techniques, highs and lows involved in disciplines outside their areas of expertise. We kicked off the year with a creative concepting day out of the office which was a great success.

In round 2, our Video department took centre stage with the launch of a film competition. Staff were divided into seven groups, and within each team members were allocated roles from director to production designer, editor to actor. The teams were led by people with no video production experience, with staff from the Video department taking supporting roles.

With only three weeks to produce a cinematic masterpiece, the competition kicked off with a three hour masterclass in ‘Acting & directing for the screen’ and ‘Camera techniques and lighting’. Then it was time to channel our inner auteurs and transform Ultimo into a local version of Hollywood, only with lower pay days, no back-end deals on the box office and fewer outrageous demands from self-important actors.

Red carpet premiere.

Like awards season in the movie biz, the paparazzi were circling and the buzz was building in the lead-up to the red carpet premiere at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington.

On the Night of a Thousand Stars the glamour quotient was high (ok, four people dressed up and wouldn’t have looked out of place on the red carpet at the Oscars – everyone else was working a more Tropfest vibe).

“Riveting…We laughed, we cried.” 5 stars, Margaret and David.*

We think the output from a room full of (mostly) amateur filmmakers was pretty damn impressive. The storytelling was diverse, there were loads of laughs on the night and it’s not everyday you get to see yourself on the big screen.

Band for Life.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEE4a_gaAk

Checkpoint.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ce1XGxSxYE

Drop bear.

Cameron Rickersey (Actor), Dirk Hohm (Actor), Matt Bertie (Director of Photography), Ross Dixon (sort of, Director), Sarah Miles (Writer & Props), Monika Natalia (Producer), Jaime Ryan (Editor)

Plastique.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXm6ECRb54Q

Mirror.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAljCnWCjpQ

Work in progress.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7828sJyeY0s

Internet stick.

David Dwyer (Director/Writer), James Hinton (Producer/Actor), Dell Matejka (Actor), Jeremy Frouin (Editor/Sound), Geoff Goddard (Director of Photography) , Ailsa Mackenzie (Actor)

And the winner is…

Two prizes were awarded on the night. And the winners were…

• Best Film: Drop Bears
• Audience Vote: The Internet Stick

We hope you enjoy watching the films as much as we enjoyed making them. Next stop Cannes…

* Not the Margaret and David from ‘At the Movies’, just two randoms who accidentally wandered into the wrong cinema.

Visit the white agency blog | Follow them/ask for their autographs on Twitter @thewhiteagency.

Artist AJ Chu is a 17-year old high school senior living in New Jersey. Via Wolf Eyebrows.

Korean artist Kwang-Ho Lee via Sarahness.

Advanced Style via Style Rookie. See also: I WANT YOUR HAIR.

Animal Atlas: Shark by Alex Carletti.

Maricor/Maricar via The Fox is Black.

Gunta Stölzel: “Slit Tapestry Red/Green,” 1927/28. Gobelin technique. Cotton, silk, linen. 150×110 cm. Via Etsy.

Untitled (Self-Portrait), c. 1979 by Nellie Mae Rowe.

David Hockney gif via Jean-Luc Godzilla.

Georgiaperry’s beautiful dreamcatchers! (See also: her giant dreamcatcher window.)

Via The Jams.

If you read one thing this week.

• Advertising people are the new advertising medium | Forbes

Management.

• How Yahoo killed Flickr and lost the internet | Gizmodo
• Power and poor decision-making | Farnam Street
• “I do shake my head in wonder though as I see some of the younger people coming into this industry, expecting fame and fortune without being prepared to put in the hard yards.” | Chris Savage’s Wrestling Possums
• Find the reverse leaders in your midst | Harvard Business Review
• In search of the money gene: What makes someone want to start a business? | Boston.com
• Marginal thinking: the danger of “just this once” | HBS Working Knowledge
• The social side of strategy: Crowdsourcing your strategy may sound crazy. But a few pioneering companies are starting to do just that, boosting organizational alignment in the process. Should you join them? | McKinsey Quarterly

Innovation.

• 5 commitments to become part of a solution to the world’s problems | Co.Exist
• The 10 most important marketing trends according to Sir Martin Sorrell | Forbes

Technology.

• GM says Facebook ads don’t pay off | WSJ.com
• On Facebook, Intent and Marketing | Noah Brier dot Com
• Browsers and Apps in 2012: The browser’s doomed, because apps are the future. Wait! Apps are doomed because HTML5 is the future. I see something almost every day saying one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong. | ongoing by Tim Bray
• The rise of the social web is not really about the end of what came before, but instead is the starting point for what comes next: richer and more complex societies. These technologies are a bridge we use to cross over into something new, not a wrecking ball tearing down the old. | Stowe Boyd

Insights.

• Designers vs. engineers | notes.unwieldy
• On floundering: Trying to figure something out on your own before getting help actually produces better results than having guidance from the beginning | TIME.com
• 8 ways to cultivate serendipity in business and life | Matthew E. May
• Moving customers from pinning to purchase | Harvard Business Review
• Oil, water, and food: how our largest companies are managing our most important resources | Co.Exist
• Modelling participation online: is the 1,9,90 rule outdated? | Only Dead Fish
• Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies (attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts) are becoming essential survival skills | Nieman Journalism Lab
• The simplicity thesis: The only companies or products that will succeed now are the ones offering the lowest possible level of complexity for the maximum amount of value | Fast Company

Creativity.

• FuelBand for alpha waves | Interconnected
• From print to iPad: designing a reading experience | 90% of everything

On Nextness this week.

• On process: the agency blogs we like are the ones that let us go behind the scenes.
• Have you liked our Nextness Facebook page yet?

STW Group news.

• Lick to win! | The White Agency
• Gamification comes of age | The White Agency
• Air New Zealand has ranked number one for the second year running in New Zealand’s annual Corporate Reputation rankings, run by AMR and the Reputation Institute. Apple took the first spot in Australia’s reputation index.
• Fuzzy heads new Vodafone campaign | SMH
• Parker & Partners summarises last week’s federal Budget.

Design consultancy BERG have high profile clients like the BBC – but you might remember them for their Little Printer which generated a lot of buzz a few months ago. It’s hard to believe that such interesting work come from a relatively small office in London. On their blog they routinely detail what each member of their small team is working on, from complex UX projects to “Simon has just brought in bacon sandwiches for everyone,” in a weekly blog post they call Weeknotes.

Last month, CEO and Principal at BERG Matt Webb used Weeknotes to describe “a pretty heavy week, dealing with some of that kind of stuff where (a) the best person in the company to deal with it is me, and (b) it’s tiring to think about.”

Switching rapidly between conversations that delight me and mental work that grinds me down has its own particular effect: to be fully involved in each activity, the feelings appropriate to the other activity have to be contained or suspended for the moment, and it’s that continual packing/unpacking/repacking that creates a novel kind of tiredness, a kind that I can only describe as – I don’t know whether this word exists outside the UK – radgy.

He goes on to talk about not being sure whether something was bad… or he was just negative. It’s a fascinating read for all managers of innovative or creative work, which depends so much on motivation, energy and mood. Obviously they’re doing something right (in a huge write-up of them, the New York Times say they’re at the forefront of experiments in humanizing technology) so it’s both fascinating and educational to take a glimpse behind the scenes.

In Portland, creative studio More & Co maintain a blog called Notes.

Using a mix of analog and digital photograhy, mixtapes, sketches and illustrations, they take us behind the scenes in the office, their shared meals and drinks.

It’s astute marketing for their art direction and styling services; each post is so beautiful it looks like it could be in a magazine. They post outtakes from and teasers for upcoming work; their subscribers are excited to see what the talented team turn their hand to next.

Meanwhile, digital product and service design company Made by Many use their blog almost as a whiteboard,  taking readers behind the scenes of key decisions they make while creating their products and campaigns.

A perfect example of this is their new app, Picle. It all started back in May 2011 when a team member posted What would Instagram sound like? He experimented, and wrote,

…what I found looking back was that the photos seemed to take on a new dimension, they come to life, allowing you to remember and relive as if you were there, which the alternative, video, can sometimes overcomplicate. It’s the halfway point that allows you to document the best bits with the pro’s of each medium. Whether the journey works as an idea, I’m not sure, but as an addition to individual images, it could be interesting?

Now, a year later, their app Picle is gaining steam. A stylish and easy-to-use little app, it records the sounds that surround you as you take a still photograph. You can see it in action in this stream from the London cultural hub the Southbank Centre.

The team is still using the blog to tease out what next for Picle, turning it into a living example of the Lean product innovation approach before its launch at SXSW, and showing how they grew and evolved from the first minimum viable product.

And most recently,

It sounds rather existential, but by watching how people use Picle and feedback to us, we have had to ask some deeper questions than ‘How can we get more people using the app?’

With all behind-the-scenes blogs, it can be scary to let people in. Isn’t it giving away trade secrets? Doing work for free? Opening yourself up for mockery or copying or both?

On this, we like to quote Rhizome’s Joanne McNeil:

Revealing influences is the confidence of a true creative person: you can see where the ideas come from, because even with the same ingredients I know you can’t bake what I’m about to with it.

Long live the process blog.

If any STW Group companies want to use Nextness to take our readers behind the scenes of their next campaign or product, tweet us.

If you read just one thing.

• Modern medicine: The nature of addictive technologies in relation to business, the power that software designers are presently wielding over the masses, and a new way of imagining companies: as medicine men for the species | Jonathan Harris

Management.

• I hate advertising | bud caddell
• Win the pitch: tips from Mastercard’s “Priceless” pitchman | Harvard Business Review
• The inside story of the Facebook showdown reveals a lot about the relative status of Wall Street banks in Silicon Valley these days, especially Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs | Business Insider
• How Hewlett-Packard lost its way | Fortune Tech
• The maturation of the billionaire boy-man: Incredibly, Mark Zuckerberg has grown up to become an ace CEO—one whose way of thinking might drive Wall Street nuts | New York
• Partners not vendors! A digital production manifesto | Undercurrent
• The future belongs to the flexible (in business as in world affairs) | WSJ.com

Innovation.

• To innovate, turn your pecking order upside down | Harvard Business Review
• Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive | Nieman Journalism Lab

Technology.

• What your Klout score really means | Wired.com
• WhatsApp bucks convention, quietly builds a messaging titan | GigaOm
• Why publishers don’t like apps: The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the web | Technology Review

Strategy.

• The simplicity thesis: The only companies or products that will succeed now are the ones offering the lowest possible level of complexity for the maximum amount of value | Fast Company
• “People feel that it is safe to consider evidence with an open mind when they know that a knowledgeable member of their cultural community accepts it.” Harvard Business Review
• Your company has social media nailed. Now what? | Fast Company
• Branding good: Q&A with GOOD Editor Ann Friedman | Sparksheet
• What defines a meme? Our world is a place where information can behave like human genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve | Smithsonian Magazine
• Study helps explain why we over-share on Facebook, Twitter | latimes.com
• How to spot the future | Wired.com

Creativity.

• Lasting value | Marco Arment
• When you make ads about everything, you make ads about nothing | The Ad Contrarian
• Writing in the dark: on being a night owl | New York

On Nextness this week.

• Nextness Visual Diary.
• Is the internet making you sad?

STW Group news.

• The day we got digi’d: a recap of STW’s first Digital Academy | Moon Blog
• We’re in the book: Moon’s work for The Darling hotel | Moon Blog
• Ogilvy Melbourne wins Australia’s only award at 2012 One Show Design
• Australia’s Young Lions finalists announced: congratulations to all from STW, too many to shout out individually! | Campaign Brief

This, apparently, is the note given to new Apple employees, via Smithery.

2. Ralphy?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jyd-p-DiA

3. Unstoppable.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUYUvY6quE0

4. Speaking of chills and tear-jerkers.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4knygiE7aAE

5. Sounds.

Cleverness in this ad for Lisbon Zoo; click to make it bigger. (Via creative criminals.)

6. Maurice Sendak on life and death.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U68bZbMM7q8

7. Nike Live for London: a love letter to the Olympic city.

“… a celebration of the London set against the backdrop of the approaching summer. This is a portrait of London; its characters, its buildings, its youth, its sports, its energy, its history, and its future. This is a BIG UP to London. Shot over a 10 day period, the film is a personal snapshot of the four corners of the capital through the eyes of 15 inspiring young Londoners at a time of year when it captures the imagination of tennis fans all over the world.” Why does this feel so fresh?

8. Brittany Meyer.

Loving her whole look.

9. Word.

A truer tweet was never tweeted.

10. See above.

A Japanese tweeter’s pic of the supermoon: スーパームーンをキャッチしたワン！ #supermoon on Twitpic (Via jomc)

• “There is so much chatter over what we’re working on, where we’ve been, where we’re going, who we’re hanging out with, what we’ve accomplished and we’re all high fiving each other every day and this is all really good stuff, but sometimes it’s really exhausting too. In the end, what does it mean anyway? … it’s easy to feel like you’re constantly measuring yourself against the world. “ Sweet fine day.
• “I… can’t shake the feeling I’m only contributing to the endless glut of sound and vision that is the internet. I wonder how many posts on other blogs I’ve actually read in the last six months, versus how many I’ve saved to read later. Later never comes. I wonder if any of us are truly reading and learning from each other, or if we’re all just treading water.“ Every Day the Same Dream.
• “Looking at people’s blogs and Instagram photos can be intimidating at times, can’t it? (I’d say on a good day it’s inspiring and on a bad day it’s intimidating.) Because here are all these people seemingly doing it all and having it all in a beautiful, perfect way. It’s hard to tell if that’s reality or if we’re only privy to seeing things from one angle. Because no one wants to post pictures of their incompetence or that time when they felt truly unlovable.” Wiksten.

Without going as far as saying Facebook is making us lonely, it’s clear there’s something wrong here.

For many of us, browsing blogs, Facebook, pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr doesn’t inspire us – it makes us think we should be CEOs with a book deal, a movie coming out, two Italian greyhounds, a perfect home and a mean signature dish.

The fact is, on every blog we’re only seeing a tiny facet of someone’s life.

It’s that realisation that prompted blogger Ez from Creature Comforts to start Things I’m afraid to tell you. ”The more and more conversations I have with other bloggers and readers of blogs, the more sure I become of the fact that we are all just a little bit sick of all this perfection,” she said.

About her own burgeoning blog and craft business she revealed:

The nitty-gritty is that some months have been so tight that I’ve worried about making my rent payment or even buying groceries…a handful of times it’s gotten scary enough that I’ve had panic attacks daily just trying to think of how I’ll make it through. Just admitting that out loud is rather humiliating.

Now fifty bloggers have chimed in to share their deepest secrets: the things they don’t like about themselves or their lives, the secret shame behind the glossy facade on their social networks.

Is that the answer to feeling “overwhelmed insignificance”? To verbalise and share self-doubt? Or does “putting it all out there” just lead to more pain?

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston; she’s spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. In her famous TED talk, she said her research revealed that opening yourself up, exposing your humanity, is key to living to living a happy, purposeful life.  ”Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change,” she said at TED2012.

When it comes to making yourself vulnerable, there’s a nice example we can share close to home. Our COO Chris Savage started blogging at Wrestling Possums exactly a year ago. In this time he’s shared his greatest failings, struggles and most private thoughts. They’re all meditations on his journey: where he’s come from and where he’ll go. “Have courage to share your stuff ups with others. They’ll appreciate it. And your learnings will spread,” Chris says.

Of course, there is always that nagging feeling: what if someone thinks I’m wrong, or silly, or laughs at me? But as blogger Anthony Panozzo says,

That’s a vestigial fear coming out, like being worried about tigers or alpha male chimpanzees. The more rational concern, and the one you should focus on, is “does anyone even know that I exist?” The only way to solve this is to write.

Next time the internet makes you sad, talk about it.

A nice wrap up of 2012 trends and start ups by Deutsch LA. Welcome to a bumper edition of Linkness!

If you read one thing.

• Has the internet run out of ideas already? | The Observer

Management.

• A primer on strategy | Farnam Street
• I am ashamed of my greatest failing-but at last I am beating it | Wrestling Possums
• The next big thing | Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review
• Talent wars: agencies are battling Silicon Valley for the best people. Here’s how they can win | Adweek
• Marketing capabilities the key to brand acquisitions: Investors reward companies that buy stand-alone brands they can market better than the sellers did | Strategy Business

Innovation.

• “Meaningful” startups | Chris Dixon
• Turntable.fm: where did our love go? “I can tell now when people say, ‘How’s it going?’ they mean, ‘You’re flattening, aren’t you?’” | Inc.com
• The companies combatting climate change in the most innovative ways | Co.Exist
• Is innovation fueled by conflict or cooperation? | Harvard Business Review
• Agile, social, cheap: The new way NPR is trying to make radio | Nieman Journalism Lab

Data.

• Myself, quantified. How data saved a W+K employee’s life | Extenuating Circumstances

Insights.

• Can a brand be “too sustainable to fail”? | Brand Channel
• Easter Island, choice, and making things people want | smithery
• Making is marketing, marketing is making | smithery
• How to fix Popchips’ racist ad campaign | Anil Dash
• Aussie consumer confidence falls to pre-GFC levels, 1/3 of Aussies think we’re in recession | mUmBRELLA
• How to tell if your agency is integrated | John St.
• Isn’t it about time that advertisers and agencies were brought to account for the way they pollute our lives? | The Sell! Sell! Sell! blog
• Facebook urges members to add organ donor status | NYTimes.com
• Nine articles ‘for women’ that journalists should stop writing | The Atlantic Wire
• Kickstarter advice from the guy whose e-paper watch raised $7.1M | Co.Design
• Why first impressions don’t matter much for experiences | Farnam Street
• Australian brands need a marketing masterclass | Marketing Week

Creativity.

• It’s time to socialize the creative brief | Facebook Studio
• The reading renaissance | NYTimes.com
• Simplicity isn’t simple | FINCH
• The director and the techie: Music-video maker Chris Milk and Web guru Aaron Koblin use crowdsourcing to make beautiful art together | WSJ.com

On Nextness.

• Sleepy, drunk, and away from your desk: how to be more creative. 
• Revisiting: How to get out of a creative rut.
• And: Do you help people build happy life stories?

STW Group news.

• Developing brands for the connected consumer | Cornwell
• The new infomercial | DTDigital Insight blog
• Samsung Galaxy launch believed to be behind ‘Wake up’ teaser campaign | mUmBRELLA
• The Ogilvy PR internship experience | Ogilvy Public Relations Australia
• What is the meaning of profitabliity? | Moon Blog
• Has the iPhone just had its 1984 moment? | DTDigital Insight Blog
• Keep big ideas big | DTDigital Insight Blog

“I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation,” he told Playboy. “It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.”

Completely burnt out, he moves to a small cabin in Woodstock New York, and doesn’t even take his guitar.

After a few days he feels a sudden sense of something to say. He picks up his pencil and out pours a twenty page torrent of “vomit,” a mish mash of diverse influences, different to anything he’s written before.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

He raced back to Studio A at Columbia Records and recorded it within a week. The six minute song changed rock and roll.

Bob Dylan’s a genius, and writing Like a Rolling Stone is an archetypal “aha” moment of creativity at work: an insight delivered when you least expect it, and a sense of certainty that it’s the right way to go.

It’s also the first story in Jonah Lehrer’s new book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer says it was realising he was in a rut and fleeing to the cabin in the woods sans guitar that gave Dylan (and his brain) permission to relax and free associate.

In other words, when you’re tackling a complex problem that requires creative thinking, mainlining coffee and chaining yourself to your desk is precisely the wrong approach.

Why? As with everything to do with the human brain, the answer is complex.

The suddenness of the insight is preceded by a burst of brain activity. A small fold of tissue on the surface of the right hemisphere, the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), becomes unusually active in the second before the insight. Once the brain is sufficiently focused on the problem, the cortex needs to relax, to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere that will provide the insight.

In fact, by using an EEG, scientists can now predict up to 8 seconds in advance if a test subject is about to achieve a breakthrough. It all comes down to alpha waves. They emanate from the right hemisphere of the brain when its feeling relaxed.

It’s a scientific seal of approval for what we’ve always known: the best insights happen away from your desk and under a warm shower.

Also good when you’re in need of an epiphany? Being sleepy – or drunk. That’s when people’s minds “are drowsy and disorganized, humming with associations that they’d normally ignore. When we need an insight, of course, those stray associations are the source of the answer.”

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted,” Albert Einstein said. With degrees in both neuroscience and literature, Lehrer confidently straddles the disparate worlds of sciences and humanities. After surveying the available research for his book Imagine, one of Lehrer’s biggest tips for people trying to be more creative is to “make time to waste time.”

But unfortunately being relaxed is only half the battle when it comes to being genuinely innovative.

The other half is just plain hard work: the editing and refining of a blinding flash of inspiration into something of significance.

“All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering,” Lehrer says. Beethoven would often rework a musical phrase seventy times before settling on the right one.

What makes some creative geniuses more likely to succeed than others? Dylan, Picasso, Steve Jobs – all very smart, but their IQs weren’t stratospheric. They don’t share a common Myers Briggs profile or any obvious commonalities on personality tests.

What it comes down to, Lehrer says, is grit. The ability to keep working long after everyone else would have given up, to persist with an idea that others mock, to keep on going.

JK Rowling had the raw talent to write her manuscript in coffee shops while her baby daughter slept beside her. But without grit – the strength and resilience needed to get past multiple rejections until someone finally bought her first book – the world would never have met Harry Potter.

So success isn’t just about raw creativity, Lehrer says. It’s talent plus effort.

On the weekend, Lehrer presented his key takeouts from Imagine at a sermon for The School of Life. Afterwards, a man stood up and asked what neuroscience really added to the equation. Why do we need scientists to tell us what, by and large, we’ve known instinctively for many years?

Lehrer assured the audience that neuroscience, as far as he was concerned, was just a new language attempting to describe the complex processes of the brain and creativity. It’s not perfect. But it does come in handy. A scientific study is still more likely than an intuition or a Coleridge quote to convince your boss that daydreaming is work.

Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works is available now. Nextness recommends it as the ideal book to pick up at the airport next time you’re flying for work. For more Lehrer, listen to WNYC Radiolab; he’s a frequent and fascinating guest.