The creative drought you hit after a brainstorm has a name — and it’s holding you back: The notion that the first ideas are usually the best might be completely wrong. This is according to a new study by Cornell University organizational behaviour professor Brian Lucas, who terms this concept “the creative-cliff phenomenon,” and argues that it is usually perseverance and deep thinking that produces original ideas, the BBC writes.

The creative cliff: This refers to the occasional pattern of diminishing returns some people face when trying to generate ideas. After an initial lightbulb moment, frustration can build, leading to a cliff-edge moment just before you throw in the towel and decide that further effort will only be a waste of time.

Initial idea generation is satisfying, but yields obvious solutions: The first few minutes of quickfire brainstorming are akin to the hit after eating a sweet, says Lucas. But after the simpler and more obvious paths are exhausted, the process slows down.

But more effort is required to connect and develop novel insights: It is only once you exhaust the obvious, that original ideas begin to surface. Sure, the quantity of ideas you produce may decline, but each idea may be of much higher quality. This theory was put to the test in a series of experiments, originally published in PNAS (pdf), where participants were asked to predict their creative output over time for a task, and then complete the actual task. Most participants believed their creativity would drop off rapidly around the halfway mark of the allotted time, but independent judges of the task found that the quality of ideas, as defined by novelty and usefulness, remained stable or even went up.

Be patient, and don’t mistake frustration with depletion: Another experiment found that participants who believed their creativity hit a cap early spent less time on tasks. Participants who rated highly phrases like “people tend to generate their best ideas first,” consequently spent the least time on creative tasks and produced the lowest quality ideas. “Your best ideas will typically take more iterations and more resources than you might initially expect,” Lucas concludes.

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