“That’s how good ideas come to us,” I say. “There are lots of sausage-making tools being hawked for strategy work, but good ideas don’t come out of mechanical tools. Conceptual tools may help us get oriented, but, in the end, good ideas basically just pop into our heads. It’s called ‘insight.’”

ideas are not things you get. People tend to think that ideas are things like diamonds. And then you go out and you get them and you grab them and you bring them back. But that's not what ideas are. Ideas are things that grow.

Mo Willems: And so the way to make a book or a story is to have the tiniest inkling of an idea and then to plant it and you

Ideas mostly come from the slow, quiet accumulation of seemingly banal and obvious habits. It’s just doing the right things to make sure your mind and your life are brimming with hearty compost.