A friend of mine is a creative director at one of those fancy agencies where everyone dresses like they just wandered out of an Architectural Digest spread. She called me last week, sounding half-delirious and half-proud.

“I was completely stuck,” she said. “We were pitching this oat milk brand that thinks it’s a self-care movement. The brief used words like ‘transcendent froth experience.’ I had nothing. My brain was oatmeal.”

So, naturally, she opened a dictionary. This is her new thing. When an idea refuses to appear, she just flips to a random word and commits to it like a cult member.

This time the word was glue.

“At first I thought, great — now I’m wasting time and hallucinating office supplies,” she said. But then something clicked. Glue is only useful when things are broken. It’s designed for cracks. For holding the mess together.

“And that’s when it hit me,” she said. “Oat milk isn’t aspirational. It’s emotional glue. It’s for the mornings when your life is barely holding it together and you still need to eat something beige.”

She built the whole pitch around that idea. Showed moody images of messy kitchens and half-eaten toast. Called it the glue ritual. The client ate it up. Literally said, “This is the most human take we’ve seen.”

She told me all this while also admitting she hadn’t showered and had written most of it in a bathrobe covered in cereal dust.

The point is, she didn’t solve the brief. She kind of tripped over it, landed face-first in a random word, and somehow came out the other side with a winning idea.

Which brings me to one of my favorite Dumbify tools:

It’s exactly what it sounds like. You pick something random, then pretend it was a brilliant choice. A single word. A postcard. A photo of an angry duck. Doesn’t matter. The goal isn’t to be right. The goal is to get unstuck.

Brian Eno swore by this. When he got bored of his own music, he didn’t power through. He got weirder. He and his artist friend Peter Schmidt made a deck of cryptic cards with instructions like “Repetition is a form of change” and “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” They called them Oblique Strategies. Executives rolled their eyes. Musicians rolled tape. Bowie used them. Coldplay used them to win a Grammy. Airports now have ambient music because Eno decided to let a card boss him around.

Sometimes you don’t need to be original. You need to be confused in a useful direction.

Try this: Open a book. Point to a word. Use it as your lens. If the word is “cactus,” congratulations! You’re now solving your problem through the logic of drought-resistant plants. Lean in.

In 1913, Duchamp got tired of painting things that looked like things. So he started dropping string onto canvas and calling it art. It wasn’t lazy. It was intentional nonsense. He called it chance operations.

Critics said it wasn’t art. Duchamp said, “That’s the point.”

He wanted to see what happened when he took himself out of the equation. And what happened was history. John Cage used Duchamp’s randomness to compose music. Modern artists still borrow his approach to avoid making the same thing over and over. Even AI researchers use randomness as a way to break out of machine habits.

The technique didn’t just create something new. It created a way to get to new.

Randomness isn’t a lack of control. It’s a strategy for bypassing your own bad habits. When your usual thinking goes in circles, randomness knocks down a wall you didn’t even see.

Define your problem. Pick a random word. Then force a connection between the two. Like your life depends on it. (It doesn’t. But your deadline might.)

Picture your brain as an overworked DJ trying to mix songs that have absolutely nothing in common. Think death metal and a lullaby playing at the same time. That’s basically what happens during forced association tasks, and surprisingly, your neural DJ can hold its own.

Researchers at the University of California discovered that when people are asked to connect unrelated ideas, their brains light up in the same areas responsible for creative breakthroughs. One part in particular, the anterior temporal lobe, starts firing like a Christmas tree. It scrambles to find patterns between things that should never go together.

In the study, participants tried to link random word pairs like “elephant” and “keyboard.” The best ideas showed up when people gave up on logic and let their minds wander into weirder territory.

Fortuitism (noun)
The belief that randomness drives all creation. Including yours.

Eno lived it. Duchamp trusted it. My creative director friend practically bathes in it. It’s not chaos. It’s creativity without a map.

Use it in a sentence: “I wasn’t procrastinating. I was engaging in fortuitism while eating Triscuits.”

Eventually, the good one will sneak in dressed as a joke.