Not everything you take in needs to become something right away. Some things need to rot for a while.

Not everything you consume needs to become content.

That sentence feels more radical than it should.

We’ve become remarkably efficient at turning experience into output. Read a book, write a post. Attend a conference, summarize the learnings. Take a photograph, share it before you’ve finished looking at it. Have a thought, optimize it.

Somewhere along the way we started treating the mind like a processing facility. Input. Transformation. Output. Repeat.

But some things need to sit around for a while.

A sentence from a book. A photograph you can’t stop thinking about. A conversation in a parking lot. A film. A failed project. A song you heard years ago in someone else’s car. A question with no immediate answer.

These things accumulate. They go underground.

Then, occasionally, something happens. A connection appears between two things that never seemed related. A problem you’ve been circling for weeks suddenly has a different shape. A phrase written years earlier finally finds the thing it was trying to describe.

Nothing useful is happening. Until it is.

That is creative compost.

Why compost, and not a library

The metaphor matters because compost isn’t neat. A library keeps things in their original form, catalogued and retrievable. Compost does the opposite. It’s made from things that are breaking down, losing their edges and giving up what they were so they can feed what comes next.

Creativity is usually described as invention. I increasingly think it has more to do with decomposition: breaking experience down, letting it lose its original shape, and allowing unrelated fragments to find one another in the dark.

Some ideas need to disappear before they know what they’re becoming.

What this looks like in the work

A rock I picked up on the Oldman River sat on a shelf in my home for years with no purpose at all. Then it ended up on a design table, helping shape the illustrations for a book about sensory experience. I didn’t know that was what it was waiting for. I wrote about that rock in The edge of a thing.

Brand work runs on the same principle. Early in an engagement there’s pressure to produce something: a direction, a line, a mark. But the most useful thing I can do in those first weeks is take in more than I can use. Much of it goes nowhere. Some of it sits for a month and then shows up as the idea.

The double diamond gets drawn as two tidy shapes. The first half, the expansive half, is really a heap. You add to it, turn it and wait. Rush that part and you get the obvious answer, delivered on time.

Collage works the same way. I keep drawers of torn paper, old print and fragments I cut out for reasons I couldn’t explain at the time. Most pieces wait for years. When one finally fits, it fits because it waited.

Keeping a heap

• Make a place for things that have no job yet. A notebook, a folder, a box. Don’t sort it too carefully.

• Let some experiences go unreported. Read the book and don’t post about it. See what’s still with you in six months.

• Turn it now and then. Go back and reread. A heap you never touch goes sour. One you turn gets warm.

• Put unrelated things side by side on purpose. That’s where the heat comes from.

• Keep your failures. A project that didn’t land is still material.

I don’t know yet

Not everything you take in needs to justify itself right away. You can’t always know what an experience will become when you first meet it.

Sometimes the only honest answer is: I don’t know yet.

That should be enough.

Some things are information. Some things become knowledge. And some things need to rot for a while.