O.K., and now to explain how it’s done. Well, it’s a little like trying to hit a bottle cap with a wire coat hanger.

Every day a songwriter rows out into the deep waters in search of his own personal Loch Ness monster. (Just a matter of time, we insist.)

Being a weary subscriber to the old inspiration-perspiration theory, I must say that minus the former, you’ll hit a sweaty dead end every time, yet without this purging of what I call “brain vomit,” you’ll never drain the 99 pieces of hooey before one of pure inspiration writes itself for you.

When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the “mere” storage and retrieval of knowledge.

What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.