I've been bombarded with adverts recently for Masterclass: the online training portal with courses from Gordon Ramsay, Serena Williams, Shonda Rhimes and other luminaries.

They're falling on deaf ears because Kathy already has an annual membership. But my ears did prick up when I heard something James Cameron said in an excerpt from his course on filmmaking and storytelling.

“Before you radiate, you need to absorb”.

His take on creativity is that your ideas come from a mashup of all the inputs you've had. “All the films you've ever watched. All the books you've ever read. All the dreams you've ever had”.

When I speak to people who are struggling to create great content to market their business a good number of them simply aren't getting enough quality input.

Not all, of course. But a great many.

If the only things you're reading are the blog posts and emails of your competitors or what happens to scroll up on your Linkedin feed then there's no way you're absorbing enough quality material to radiate quality yourself.

(I guess saying that is a little ironic as this email is based on an advert I saw when randomly browsing YouTube but you get what I mean).

In Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From he highlights that innovations most often happen in what's known as the “adjacent possible”.

Something outside your current field – but not so far outside that no one can make the link yet.

If all you read is stuff inside your field your ideas will be so similar to all your competitors they'll be barely distinguishable.

But if you dip into adjacent fields your brain will pick up things you can apply. Perhaps not immediately: Tim Berners-Lee's ideas for the World Wide Web were inspired by the format of a Victorian “how to” book he read as a child. But they'll come.

If you're in marketing that might mean a detour into psychology or anthropology. If you're in leadership then perhaps history or even animal behaviour!

And, of course, fiction works too. Our great authors understood human behaviour long before the scientists did.