Hard work is what you do once you have a creative direction. Before you have creative direction, you need "work hard" fertilizing your mind with inspirational

Hard work is what you do once you have a creative direction. Before you have creative direction, you need "work hard" fertilizing your mind with inspirational material, then relax and let your brain create connections on its own. This process might need to be repeated frequently, but it is how big ideas are grown. Think of your potential idea space like a box. When you relax the box moves around and reconfigures itself into different shapes. If you are actively thinking, this locks the box in the current location and shape. This can be useful when you want to explore the current box a bit more, but there is only so much exploring you can do within the current box before you are just retracing your steps. If you are always in explore mode without letting the box move and reconfigure you're just going to generate small variations on the same old ideas.