On its face, it sounds ludicrous. A musical. About one of America’s founding fathers. Played by a black actor. And elements of rap and hip-hop. It does not mesh. And yet, Hamilton the Broadway musical earned every accolade possible.

It won 11 Tony awards. And the Pulitzer for the best drama. How did Lin-Manuel Miranda create the musical that became a masterpiece?

Miranda and his mentor

In 2008, Miranda read a biography of Alexander Hamilton. And immediately started thinking of how to make a play out of it. When he met Stephen Sondheim – the creator of The Westside Story musical – he got a lot of encouragement for his crazy idea.

Whenever Miranda would ask for feedback, Sondheim would often give him one word advice: variety.

Add more variety. Change up what’s happening every 8 bars. Surprise is essential.

But how do you do that? How do you constantly and consistently change the elements of the music, of the story, of the play?

The start to creativity: collect eclectic ideas

Miranda took 7 years to compose his musical. He centered the musical around Hamilton’s biography. But he didn’t stop there. He dug in deeper and read the original writings of various other founding fathers. He then incorporated the styles of other hit Broadway shows like Jesus Christ Superstar. And then to depict the political debates, he took inspiration from rap battles. He studied and collected lyrics from Tupac and Jay Z.

It’s this constant process of consuming varied ideas and then connecting dots that others can’t which makes Miranda a genius. But consuming is one thing. And creating something out of it is another.

Creativity is discovery

If you go through the history books, you will find that all great creators maintained an idea journal, folder, or box. Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas Edison both maintained multiple journals full of ideas they came across or were working on. Whole projects were incubated from rough ideas stored in these journals

When the comedian George Carlin passed away in 2008, his daughter Kelly got access to 3 whole storage units. There were folders full of ideas. Every joke Carlin delivered could be traced to one of those ideas in one of those folders.

When Carlin was 18 years old and worked at a radio station, his boss told him to write down every idea he had. And have a system for filing it all.

Carlin took that advice to heart. Carlin’s big themes were big ideas, minutiae of everyday life, and weirdness of language. Every idea he got would be written on index cards or scrap of papers. Which would then be filed in a specific folder. The folder would be colour coded based on a theme. 

That’s how Carlin could connect and create multiple jokes on a single topic. 

Best selling author Ryan Holiday does something similar. Every quote or fact or story he comes across goes on an index card. And the index cards are filed in shoe boxes – categorized by subject matter. 

“A lot of creativity is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered, and our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.” – George Carlin

How to categorize creativity: the PARA method

This writing down of ideas and categorizing them means you don’t have to rely on your memory. You can give time for cross pollination to happen. Varied dots get connected.

Tiago Forte gives a nifty framework for categorizing your work. The PARA method. Have a box or folder for each:

• Project: any activity that would have a deadline or fixed goals is a project.
• Areas: every activity that requires regular maintenance. Health, finance, relationships.
• Resources: Useful or interesting information and learnings.
• Archive: Move the inactive folders from any of the above 3 bullet points to archives.

Once you have a good simple filing system, the next step is to allocate time to regularly refer to it. 

Miranda took copious notes when he read and did his research. Because of his extensive notes, one day – two ideas merged. 

Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant. Immigration is a hot topic today as well. You could weave a 300 year old story and make it relevant for modern audiences by focusing on immigration.

The best discourse to show a debate are rap battles. The focus on rap and hip-hop made it ok for an African American actor to play a White founding father. It seems cuckoo but it works. And indeed becomes a talking point.

These two disparate dots, when connected together, gave us a musical that just worked on multiple levels.

Action Summary:

• Creativity is collecting and rediscovery. Collect ideas and file them using a simple process. Collect variedly and your output will have variety.

• Rediscovery requires putting in time to refer to your collections regularly. If you file well, connecting of dots becomes easier.