A weekly newsletter on creative thinking
Become irresistibly creative.
A free weekly newsletter on creative thinking. Every issue brings one provocation — a fresh way to see, and the push to find the idea everyone else walked past. Short enough for a coffee. Good enough to change your week.
You're in. The first issue lands soon.
Free. Weekly. Deliciously short.
What to expect, every week
Equal parts spark and substance — one letter that leaves you thinking differently for the rest of the week. The rare newsletter you actually look forward to.
The thinking
You don't crack a problem by staring harder at the problem. You crack it by picturing the answer — vivid and finished — then working back to how you get there.
That's the work of Jam & Cream: to provoke an answer from outside the known. To look past the obvious, see what everyone else missed, and find the idea that makes people stop and want it.
From the Latin inspirare — “to breathe in.” From spiritus: breath, spirit.
The arrival of an idea from somewhere past the obvious — less something you chase, more something you let in. It tends to come in the quiet, the moment the thinking stops.
The trap
It feels safe, because everyone can see it — which is exactly why it's worthless. The better idea is always one step past the obvious.
Unexpected.
That's the whole game.
What lands in your inbox
A single provocation to knock you out of autopilot — a reframe, a prompt, a question that won't leave you alone until you've answered it.
Drawn from twenty years and a creative agency built to a hundred people and sold. Creativity with a commercial spine — ideas that move people and numbers.
Beautifully short. The one you open first and finish before the coffee goes cold. No fluff, no filler, ever.
Read one first
Why the first idea is rarely the one worth having — and how to find the one everyone else walked past.
The word is older and stranger than we treat it — and it tells you exactly where ideas come from.
Four things creative work can do. Do none of them and you've done the one unforgivable thing — been dull.
Who writes it
I have a passion for the original — for ideas that actually click and work. For the nerve to think bravely, and to keep looking when the answer isn't in the obvious place everyone else already checked.
I'm Frank McCaughey. Over twenty years I built a creative agency to a hundred people, was named Agency of the Year twice, and sold it — and I've spent just as long chasing where great ideas really come from. Jam & Cream is where I share what I've found.
Be one of the first thousand. Jam & Cream is for entrepreneurs, marketers, accountants (yes, accountants), artists and writers — everyone who'd rather have the idea than the meeting about the idea.
You're in. The first issue lands soon.
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