Creative Cycle

Reading about great thinker-builders like Leonardo da Vinci (Issue #46) provides a blueprint for expanding thinking and excelling alongside artificial intelligence.

The more AI permeates work culture, the more I work to understand how I think—to externalize my thinking in a way I can see it, understand it, and improve it.

It’s a pursuit not just to think more clearly, but to integrate AI in the process. To do so, you need to understand the process—the holistic Creative Cycle that moves ideas from conception to creation.

Along the creative journey, you spark insights, generate related ideas, and create distinct artifacts. If you rush to the end state, you miss those beautiful moments along the way. So part of this process is externalizing those moments, capturing them, and drawing a line between the moment and the insight.

Why? Because all those wondrous “aha moments” are central to the human experience and creative process. The better you understand how they come to life, the better your intuition, taste, and thinking become.

AI can’t give you insights or key takeaways, no matter how much all the rampant AI features in products want you to believe.

Insights are personal. When you read something, watch something, or talk to someone, the information resonates because of the intricate medley happening in your mind. The information connects to a childhood memory; the specific phrasing reminds you of something an old boss used to say; the thought maps directly to one of your own. These are personal moments. And they are moments that create clarity, the purest form of knowledge.

This is the Creative Cycle, a process you can integrate in your workflow to improve your thinking and unlock more insights. And it creates natural integration points with AI, envisaging a future where human and artificial intelligence co-create clarity at scale.

I ran an experiment this past week with a new Notion setup for this process, which integrates directly into my Thought Lab (Issue #25).

The tool doesn’t matter—it’s the process that drives it. Choose what works for you. We’ll talk about the process, and then how you can embed this workflow as a system of creation.

1. Thinking

The creative process begins with thinking.

The ideas begin percolating in your head, socializing with the rich tapestry of your emotional state, lived experiences, and information you’ve consumed.

The quality of your thinking is shaped by your internal state—your emotions, memories, lived experiences—and your external environment—the information you absorb, and signals you focus on. What you’ve lived plus what you let in.

Thinking is an emergent, generative, creative process. You have to sit with the idea. You can’t force its development, much like you can’t tell your children to “grow up.” It’s on its own time.

This is the hardest part of the process because it is when ideas are most volatile. They require nurturing through quiet reflection and focused inquiry. And finding time for quiet reflection is no easy task, especially in our loud, distracted, and information-overloaded world.

Find the time when you can. Let your mind wander in the shower, leave your phone at home on a walk, and just be present. Thinking is really an exercise in staying present, of following the natural river of thoughts that flow through your mind. In meditation, you practice acknowledging those thoughts, and letting them move on so you can focus on your breath, the purest focal point of intention. But with quiet reflection and focused inquiry, the focal point shifts to the thought, not your breath.

Same principle, different focus.

And, if we’ve learned anything from the great thinker-builders like da Vinci, it’s that ideas like to network and socialize. Don’t obsess over the one idea. Explore widely, learn deeply, and let the serendipity unfold. Insights are fickle, and often arrive in unexpected ways.

2. Talking

When ideas are nurtured, they reach a stage where you need to say it out loud. This is when you start verbalizing the idea. It begins to take on new shapes when it’s externalized. What started in your head, when exposed to open air, reacts to the environment and mutates. And it’s compounded by the alchemy of conversation. Your conversational partner’s internal state and external environment mix with your own and create a new element.

Who you talk to matters. Remember, the idea is still delicate. You need someone you trust.

This is also a perfect place to work with AI. I use ChatGPT with custom projects, which include custom instructions, files (context), and knowledge of all its related chats (more context). I work back and forth with ChatGPT and a doc in Notion. Doing so allows me to ask Notion AI to summarize my work into a prompt I can pass back to ChatGPT. Yes, you can tell one LLM to give you a prompt for another LLM. It’s a simple trick that works well. This may feel inefficient, but the exchange of information is exactly what this phase is about—whether it’s human connection or an artificial conversation built on engineered context. And I’m certain that, in the future, AI will be deeply integrated enough to hold all the context, removing the need for shuttling the information.

If writing feels overwhelming, try voice-to-text and just start talking. This is a great way to emulate in-person conversations with AI. The purpose isn’t to avoid valuable conversations with real humans. AI gives you an always-on, infinitely patient collaboration partner. But you need to be mindful of the limitations of LLMs, though. They are too amenable. If you ask, “Do you think this is a good idea?,” it will always reply in the affirmative. You can engage critical thinking and prompt it to challenge you, but it’s still going to be amenable, even when wrong.

Trust your intuition.

These are all just considerations. Don’t isolate on one method. Diversity in conversation creates diversity in thought and, as a result, strengthened ideas. The goal is to find the friction, capture feedback, and refine thinking.

3. Sketching

Now it’s time to put it on the page.

Sketching is where ideas become tangible. You add structure in the form of visuals and language, the raw materials of creation. Sketching on a piece of paper; writing a simple outline; drawing diagrams. You capture the essence of the idea without the polish.

It’s intentionally rough. The form begins to take shape and establish direction. Before this, the idea was floating in space without a physical form (in a way). Now, the idea is tangible, creating another element in the continued development of the idea.

Switching from verbal to visual is when you rapidly prototype your idea. The new form generates new perspectives, new questions, and new feedback loops. The nature of the work is low-fidelity because, like the thinking stage, you need to prevent attachment to one path. Sketches are easy to throw away and, more importantly, for trying divergent solutions.

Iteration speed is critical in sketching.

Being the middle stage, there’s less intentional slowness. Sketching requires rapid testing from the inputs (thinking + talking) to set a course for the final output (drafting + creating).

Move fast and break things is a common tech trope, but is true in this case. The breakage here is a signal, a learning, a compass. Use it to frame the idea, explore outputs, and iterate.

4. Drafting

Sketching brings early structure, but drafting is where you give it shape.

The course is set, and your idea begins to emerge in what will be the final form, a coherent whole from which you refine. The idea is aligned with your original intention, and you’ve zeroed in on the core concept.

If sketching is low-fidelity, then drafting is mid-fidelity. This is your written draft; a FigJam visual; a Loom video talking through the idea.

While the content of what you’re drafting depends on the idea, I’m a firm believer that drafting is best reflected in writing. Nothing can interrogate an idea quite like writing it down, seeking the right words, and testing its validity in coherent language. I experimented with AI when writing, but it felt wrong, like a foreign object in my body (having not ever actually experienced that). I love to write. I believe in writing. Why would I give that up? Why would anyone give that up? Please don’t.

Keep writing, thinking, and beginning your drafts in written form. Use AI strategically as a thinking partner to check grammar, find better analogies, and experiment with wording. But be mindful. Struggling to think of the right word or analogy is part of the process. It’s like reaching for your phone too quickly when you can’t remember that character’s name on the show you just watched. Wait a bit. You know that wonderful feeling when you finally—randomly and hours later—remember their name? That’s the byproduct of letting the process work.

Don’t shortcut your drafts.

5. Creating

Creating is where you bring it to life.

Like all the steps before it, this step goes through continued refinement. Speed and quality converge on the speed of iteration.

Momentum is your friend. Just keep moving.

The best way to overcome inertia and move forward creatively is with feedback. And the best products are created with fast Feedback Loops (Issue #23). Feedback drives iteration and iteration drives quality.

This part of the process is when the shareable artifact emerges. While you can absolutely share your early thinking, drafts, and sketches, this is when you really test for clarity. You share more widely. You collect more inputs and leverage the information to refine.

Does the idea make sense? Is it clear?

And then, eventually, you face the creator’s ultimate question: Is it done?

Like all the more-art-than-science activities, you don’t know until you do. For me, it’s when you can’t add anything else, or take anything away. Each attempt feels wrong. The law of diminishing returns always strikes here.

Improving your intuition helps. And so does leaning into this entire process. When you intimately understand your idea—know all its edges—you improve your discernment to decide when it’s done. Or, like Rick Rubin says in The Creative Act:

The work is done when you feel it is.

Progress, not perfection.

Workflow

That may sound like a lot of work—and it often is—but these stages can also move quick. Some ideas need more time than others, and no two ideas flow the same. Treat each considerately.

This is the process I’ve followed for some time, but I just never wrote it down before now.

The idea wasn’t ready to grow yet.

When I ran the experiment this week to trial this process, I built a workflow to externalize thinking, capture signals, and create a space where ideas tied to a larger concept I call a thread. Threads exist in a Notion database, and are used to relate multiple ideas under a single umbrella—the thread I’m pulling at.

Each idea is a single Notion template with:

1. Focus: The core theme, question, or problem being worked on.
2. Inputs: Any information (feedback, context) to help create the artifact.
3. Process: The working visuals and language.
4. Outputs: The shareable artifact(s).
5. Signals: Tensions, decisions, insights.

By seeing the idea worked out in a Notion doc, I had a space to see the process, manipulate it, and draw connections to other parts of my system: insights, stories, other ideas.

The workflow looked like this:

• Create the new Notion page.
• Write down the focus of the idea.
• Start collecting inputs: links to other documents, conversations with others, and anything else to help the process.
• Start sketching and drafting in the process section. I included screenshots from my notebook and snippets from conversations with ChatGPT I synthesized.
• I added the final output: the write-up, Loom video, visuals. The thing that’s shared.
• When I identified a tension, decision, or insight, I wrote it down in the doc.

Through the test on the first thread, I expanded the initial idea into two more, identified multiple insights, and more clearly identified connections along the way. I spent two hours on the first idea only to decide to abandon it for another idea. But I still captured multiple insights. Never failures—only learning.

Start with the idea. Be present and sit with it before you say the idea out loud. Then add it to the page with low-fidelity sketching and rapid prototyping. Give it some shape with drafts and continued iteration. Finally, bring it to life in its final form, and use your intuition to guide you.

This is the Creative Cycle.