The beauty of a blank canvas —and other secrets of creativity

Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? That’s not happening. I’m staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable space—the blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false starts—isn’t a nuisance. It’s where creativity lives.

Today, the temptation is to skip past all that. With AI, you don’t even need to know where you’re going. The bot can map it out, hand you something good enough. But what does good enough mean if you didn’t wrestle with the idea yourself? 

A recent MIT Media Lab study, Your Brain on ChatGPT, found that people who wrote without AI showed the strongest and most widespread brain activity, tied to creativity and memory. Essays produced with LLMs, by contrast, were described as flatter and more forgettable. The researchers warn that skipping the messy part of creation may create “cognitive debt”—you get an output, but you don’t actually grow. 

How to avoid this? Create, restrain, and edit the hell out of where you’ve been. 

Create: Start Messy, Start Anyway

Starting anything new, even if you’ve done it a million times, is one of the great joys of the creative world. Sure, I could fill a blank canvas (or deck, or comp) with tried-and-true things we know work, but the beauty of creativity is that the first version is never, never, the last version. We have to start somewhere so we have something to improve. 

I see creatives regularly jump right into making slides. Creating templates and parameters to work with that map out all the “must have” components of a complete idea. But when you’re just starting out you don’t need completely connected dots, just a gathering of interesting things that could become the idea. I personally like to read the brief and try to let it go, but keep a literal blank sheet of paper in front of me for the day or a new note on my phone. I jot down the sparks and weird things I come across during the day and keep adding to it while going about my life. In the collection stage it’s about volume and seeing where the energy of ideating takes you. 

Restrain: Creativity Thrives Within Limits

Think of a tight budget like a limited palette. Only have $500? You’ll approach the recycled cardboard canvas way differently than you’ll approach that 10-foot primed beauty with endless oils on hand. Only have two days? You’ll make different choices than if you had two months. No designer available? Better figure out how to do it with words.

Great restraint is only going to get harder with so much immediate action at our fingertips. But those who can hold back—who know how to simplify—will reach simple, compelling, and worthwhile ideas faster.

Amazon is known for having their teams create fake press releases instead of pitches to help contextualize the details of an idea. A great exercise later in the process when you need to describe what you’re looking to achieve. Lately, I’ve had our teams test how much an idea can scale by writing it up in different voices. How would your favorite podcast host take and run with the idea? Does it still work and how does the tool of only audio change what you have to say?

Good marketers shouldn’t fear constraints. Use them strategically. Whether it’s a tighter budget, a shorter timeline, or a smaller format, guardrails force creativity and result in sharper, more memorable work.

Edit: The Discipline That Makes Ideas Great

Good editing is another great skill of this new age: the ability to cut, to know what’s worth amplifying, and to decide what actually makes the main feed. But editing is harder in an AI-powered world. Like the dopamine loop of social media, LLMs can make every idea feel validated: Here’s your idea! You’re brilliant! The client just doesn’t get it! False confidence is dangerous.

The only way to become a strong editor is to put in the work: writing, failing, and listening. Taking feedback not from machines, but from mentors, peers, and audiences. I learned how to develop good ideas by generating a lot of bad ones—and killing most of them.

Editing is leadership. Brands and agencies need to create a culture where teams aren’t just encouraged to generate but also to refine. Build space for young creatives to dream wildly, then guide them through the discipline of cutting back to the ideas that truly deserve to live.

I got better at editing by getting off the computer and having the conversation with someone else far away from the work and without the material in front of me. What remains? What must be said in a conversation to have it all make sense. If you have it, it’s easy to see what stays. If you find it confusing to even share over conversation the work needs more refinement, and maybe an edit overhaul. 

I believe the creative work that stands out will be anything that resists skipping to “good enough.” It’ll embrace the blank canvas, lean into the discomfort, and edit ruthlessly until what’s left is not just efficient, but meaningful.