9. Don’t do lunch

Drink too much, stay up late, take the morning off, get up at 4 a.m., do all the wrong things and then start being creative.

In the middle of the day you should either be working obsessively or recovering from a night on the tiles.

By avoiding all the usual times for eating and sleeping, you can learn to step outside the normal social timetable. One of Bruce Mau’s statements in his inspiring Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is: ‘Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.’ Certainly it’s important to be persistent when attacking a creative problem and to keep working even when you and everyone else feel like giving up. If you push yourself – don’t bother having that break, going to lunch or heading for bed – eventually something will happen.