If you work in marketing, creativity isn’t a luxury—it’s your edge. But there are days (okay, months) when your brain feels like it’s been in a pitch meeting since 2019. You’re not out of ideas because you’re uncreative. You’re out of ideas because the system you’re running on doesn’t support idea generation.

Let’s fix that—fast.

1. Creativity shows up where it’s welcomed

Start treating your creative hits like they matter.
Ideas—especially the weird ones—won’t stick around if they’re constantly dismissed, skipped over, or filed under “maybe later.”

That means you need to capture them. Write them down. Speak them into a voice memo. Scribble them on the back of your kid’s math homework. Doesn’t matter how—just signal to your brain that the idea had value. This alone will prime you for more ideas tomorrow.

Creative momentum builds the minute you stop ignoring your own sparks.

2. Disrupt your patterns—deliberately

You don’t need a weekend retreat to shake things loose. You need 3 minutes of intentional disruption.

• Write next week’s email subject lines while standing outside.
• Take one campaign you ran last year and reverse the format.
• Challenge yourself to come up with 3 alternate headlines using only metaphors.
• Brainstorm upside-down—what wouldn’t solve the problem?

Even a small change in location or routine forces your brain off autopilot. New environment = new neural connections. And you don’t have to wait for “flow” to start—just act, and the flow often catches up.

3. Train your brain like a strategist, not a content machine

Most marketers burn out their creativity by treating it like a vending machine: insert stress, expect results. But creative thinking thrives when you practice two things:

Challenging assumptions.
Ask:

• “Do we actually need more leads, or just a higher LTV from existing ones?”
• “Are we solving the wrong problem?”
• “What if we killed the whole funnel and rebuilt it from what customers actually do, not what they’re ‘supposed’ to do?”

Introducing randomness on purpose.
You’re stuck because you keep reaching for the same three solutions. Try pulling something completely unrelated into the mix—like what can a parking garage teach you about onboarding emails? (Hint: clarity, direction, level labeling, and zero room for wrong turns.)

This isn’t fluff. This is how innovation actually happens.

Want more creativity? Stop asking for it. Build it.

When you encourage ideas, break predictable patterns, and wire in strategic habits that force new thinking—you’re not just waiting around for inspiration. You’re manufacturing it.
On deadline. On demand. And on your terms.