You (thinking about students at the moment) need experiences which provide you with a savings account of opportunities you can draw from.

Helmut Krone, one of my favorite couple of historically important art directors, once said to me, “You need to know the answer before you hear the question. Then all you have to do is reword the question to fit your answer.”

I use to talk to my students about having ideas “on the shelf.” You constantly look for ideas you can store until you need them. What could you do with this? How might this be applied? You get a picture in your head and then you put it on the shelf, to call down later when you need a solution. Doing the pieces that have little obvious value, because you can do so many of them and because they don’t carry much pressure, can offer important leaps in creativity in some future project.

From Wikipedia : Helmut Krone (July 16, 1925 – April 12, 1996) was an art director and is considered to be a pioneer of modern advertising.[1] Krone spent over 30 years at the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. He was the art director for the popular 1960s campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, which featured a large unadorned photo of the car with the tiny word "Lemon" underneath it; the series of "When you're only No. 2, you try harder" advertisements for Avis, and the creation of Juan Valdez, who personified Colombian coffee. During his career, Krone won a number of awards and was inducted in both the One Club's Creative Hall of Fame and the Art Directors Hall of Fame. His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian.

Volkswagen