I used to get my best ad ideas while vacuuming. It wasn’t office-friendly at all, but I still believe it is my magic antidote to idea-emptiness. Now I’m beginning to doubt that it’s true. Damn you, Rob Morrison. [:ed]

When you think about it, being a professional creative, is a very strange way to earn a living. We take long, vague, dreary, client strategy decks and turn them into simple, clear, beautiful customer comms. In my cynical moments I’ve described it as convincing people to buy things they don’t want, don’t need and can’t afford.

Is it any wonder adland attracts misfits? The quirky. The odd. And it’s even less of surprising almost every creative has a superstition. Ways we work. Favourite places. Tricks we use to get into the right headspace.

I remember seeing a freelancer arrive at an agency and insist on a substantial reference budget. He spent hundreds on expensive art books then shut himself in a room for three days. He spoke to no-one. The result was, wait for it, nothing. Didn’t produce a single idea. Nadda. Zip. When challenged his response was, “The magic doesn’t just happen, you know.”

Clearly, Magic Man was an extreme (and became an agency meme).

Me? I liked familiarity. My office was always a shrine to people I’d worked with. Those I admired. I had a signed baseball bat I was given just before getting married (I did say quirky). Subsequent workmates added a signed AFL and ARU ball. There was the stack of ADMA Award books with inspiring work from my peers. You’d find a library of industry books from legendary copywriters like Herschell Gordon-Lewis, Steve Harrison and David Ogilvy. Plus, I was scouring local charity shops to rescue paperbacks from the likes of Grisham, Le Carre and Cruz Smith.

I think I was subconsciously hoping a little of their collective genius might rub off. But there was a day of reckoning.

The agency I worked for moved into a building designed around ‘Activity-based Working’ (for some reason everyone refused to say ‘Hotdesking’.) It meant every day I had to move to a different desk in a different spot – some days it wasn’t even a desk. It made surrounding myself with ‘familiarity’ impossible. Then something remarkable happened.

Nothing.

I didn’t suffer immediate writer’s block. I wasn’t busted as a fraud for writing a million shit ideas before finding something worth presenting. Truth is, the work kept flowing. I still had enough perspective to review work in a calm, considered manner. I still prepared pitch and client presentations the same way. Sure, noise-cancelling headphones became a must have. But, for the most part, it was copy as usual.

So, here’s the advice for young copywriters and art directors.

That lucky charm, or favourite app, or piece of tech you feel like you simply can’t do without? You can. You don’t need your iThis or iThat.

The only mandatory is your talent. And that goes with you, everywhere.

No magic required.

Rob Morrison was creative director at Ogilvy Australia for seven years and before that milestone, creative director at BWM (now BWM Dentsu), George Patterson Y&R (now VMLY&R), The Campaign Palace and Wunderman. He is now freelance at morrison.creative.