Albert Read talks to Chris Evans about how to have more good ideas

Virgin Radio

22 Mar 2023, 11:10

Managing director of Condé Nast Britain, Albert Read joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about his new book, The Imagination Muscle. 

Albert oversees titles and businesses including British Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Tatler. In The Imagination Muscle, he shows how the imagination is not merely reserved for artists and creatives, but is a muscle to be trained and developed. He told Chris: “I work in the business of ideas. Conde Nast is a company that thrives on ideas. And we got to keep ideas coming… If you're selling bananas, you want to know where the bananas come from, and so, with us, we need to know where the ideas are coming from. 

“What struck me really about ideas and imagination is, we see it as something that is a fixed quantity, something that's bestowed on us from above… And my line in this book is, actually, imagination is something you can work at. We pay attention to our physical health by going to the gym, going running. We pay attention to our emotional wellbeing, but we don't really pay attention to our imaginative health. And that's what this book is doing. It's saying, ‘You can be more imaginative. And then here are some ideas of how you can do it.’”

The book answers questions such as: What techniques can we use to stimulate imaginative thinking? How can we learn to foster skill in observation and connection? Giving some examples, Albert said: “The obvious ones that we all know about are having ideas in the shower. So, someone like Aaron Sorkin, who writes The West Wing, when he's writing, he has five showers a day, because he keeps his mind going. It loosens the mind, It has this loosening quality, having a shower. Going for long walks, something invented by the Romantic poets. They realised that if you walk, you have ideas. 

The author also spoke about how “Vladimir Nabokov writer used to have his ideas for novels in a car after a long journey” and said: “It's the same when you leave parties. When you come out of a party, and you’re on your own, walking down a cold street, your mind floods with ideas, and this is something that Diderot, the Enlightenment writer, realised; L'esprit de l'escalier, the spirit of the staircase, when you leave a party and you're stumped for that clever repost and you go downstairs and you think, ‘If only I’d thought of that earlier’.

The book also examines pioneers such as Picasso and Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Picasso is interesting, because one of the things I talked about in the book is originality,” Albert said. “We think of Picasso as being this great original artist, and his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon set the course of Modern Art in the 20th Century. But actually, what he did very cleverly is he picked ideas from artists like El Greco and Cezanne, and then he went to this museum of African artefacts, and he combined ideas in a new way. And really, one of the themes of The Imagination Muscle is how you widen your imaginative palette, and how you draw ideas in.

“The other person that I talk about is Lin Manuel Miranda. His genius, for me, is not just that he composed Hamilton and put Hamilton on stage, but he had this combination of ideas from different sources. He knew about Eminem and Tupac Shakur and rap and hip-hop, but he also knew about the conventions of musical theatre from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and he had read this big thick biography of a relatively obscure founding father. 

“So you had this mixture of ideas. And really, I think the lesson from this and from Picasso, is draw your sources from all sorts of different places and bring them together and read what no-one else is reading. Because that will make your mind an original mind, a fresh mind, and it'll keep you stimulated and keep you happy, and keep you alive.”

Albert, who began his career as a journalist, told Chris: “The problem with modern life is we'll get into our trenches, we will have our fields of expertise and social media drives us as well. We will become very, very good at one very, very small thing. And what was interesting in history - people like da Vinci being the prime example - is people saw across these trenches. And even in the 19th Century, poets also were interested in science, and scientists were also interested in the arts. So you had people like Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin and he won the Nobel Prize. He was also an artist.”

Speaking more about Leonardo da Vinci, he said: “While he was painting the Mona Lisa, he would paint it during the day. And then at night, he would go to this mortuary in Florence, and he dissected cadavers. And he would study very, very closely, the way a smile works and the way that the curve of a nostril is delineated. So he took his scientific learnings and really took art to the next level by really understanding the muscular makeup of the face.”

Albert told Chris: “I think that's the lesson we all have to learn is we should all widen our perspectives, read things that we wouldn't necessarily normally read. Read differently, don't read one book and then another book. Read different books at the same time. So there are lots of ideas from history which I think need to be revived and brought to the fore.”

During his conversation, Albert said: “All the research shows that if you occupy an imaginative life, if you're creative, you're a happier person. I think one of the problems with society today is we delegate the imaginative activity to the experts, and we become consumers. In societies of old, everyone would participate in imaginative activities, whether it's dancing or singing. And we've kind of lost that. And we’ve become passive consumers of Netflix, off TV, of all sorts of media. And really, to get back that individual imaginative muscle is part of what makes you happy, and it's part of what makes you alive.”

The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How To Have More Of Them) is out tomorrow (23rd March). 

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or  catch up on-demand here.