Illustration from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1888)
I have a brilliant friend who has approximately one really good idea per year. He sometimes will take several weeks just to write and think, cancel all meetings, retreat into his room, break out pen and paper, and "start from first principles" or "rethink it all." He's a machine learning researcher whose one big idea usually results in one big paper per year which showcases a new technique or result.
This pattern made me think about idea generation more broadly, the pace at which different people produce good, novel ideas, and how we might cultivate our ability to generate them.
The Timescale of Ideas
Researchers and artists are allowed and often expected to have long periods of fallowness punctuated by moments of brilliance or peak productivity. In fact, we sometimes appreciate the slowness of their processes to show the effort that went into an idea. If your ideas are good enough, you don't need that many of them, and for some folks, a long seemingly rest period is needed before the next.
Other roles demand more constancy but do not require as high of peaks. A manager cannot cancel all meetings for two weeks to rethink it all. But it's also, for the most part, fine if they don't have any moments of brilliance: they can keep the trains running, apply best practices, do common sense things, and we would deem them to be doing a good job. There can be novel ideas in management and moments of brilliance, but this isn't usually the expectation.
There's a great essay about finding the timescale at which you excel. This can range from microseconds (athletes, video game players) to years (researchers). How often you need to have good ideas, and how good they need to be, is a related axis. If you need to be making decisions on the order of seconds and minutes, mostly you can't come up with brilliant ideas -- human brains usually don't work like that. But if you can make decisions on the length of months or years, you have time for “better” ideas.
How Do Good Ideas Emerge?
I am fascinated by where really good ideas come from. "Really good ideas" is obviously quite a vague designation, and for me encompasses an incredibly wide range of things from the theory of evolution, to the germ theory of disease, the discovery of penicillin, abolition, checks and balances, dishwashers, solar energy, the scaling hypothesis and many more. A "really good idea" can be a scientific breakthrough, a policy, a product, an insight about the human condition, and so on. You know it when you see it.
For a slapdash and nonexhaustive typology of ways that really good ideas come to be:
One thinks very hard and applies some internal resource whether logic or imagination
Examples: pythagorean theorem, mathematical infinity, boolean algebra, perhaps abolition and democracy (both involved moral contemplation, but benefit from observations of empirical facts)
One runs experiments and generates novel data
Examples: Radioactivity, penicillin, plate tectonics, vaccination
One synthesizes other sources or ideas into a novel and illuminating insight
Examples: Behavioral economics, the internet, Modern Evolutionary Synthesis
One travels physically or intellectually far and brings back something that is then applied in a wholly novel domain or way
Examples: Steve Jobs incorporating calligraphy principles into computer design, Henry Ford applying principles of a slaughterhouse to car manufacturing in the assembly line, Velcro inspired by plant burrs, Cubism inspired by African Masks
…
How to Increase Your Number of Good Ideas
Practice
I have, at points, tried to have more good ideas. I once got advice from a friend to practice making a list of ideas on some topic each day. I had to list 50-100 ideas regardless of how many supposedly good ones I could come up with. This often resulted in listing many outlandish or idiotic ones. He said you couldn't censor yourself because it hurt the flow of ideas. If you managed to get more than your requisite number, you could go back and delete some.
I did this before starting a new job (projects to do, ways to improve the organization) and it did actually end up being useful. I sadly stopped the practice (it was tiring!) so I can't speak to any longstanding effects on increasing my ability to have good ideas.
A key takeaway from this is the importance of having more ideas, regardless of their quality. This can come from generating more, or from self-censoring less. Perhaps you have ideas, but you don't recognize them as such, don't nurture them, or don't share them.
Acquire Novelty
It's good to perturb your information intake. By default, we end up interacting with the same circle of people discussing the same topics (our friends and coworkers, our job, the news in our industry or area). This means that you quickly exhaust the ideas that can come from these inputs. Getting outside these inputs through talking to new people, physically changing location, or ingesting information on different topics can open new pathways to new ideas. I occasionally find that after a particularly good conference or trip I will have more ideas, and that's the result of this influx of novelty.
Overcome Failures of Nerve
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described two common ways to fail: failures of imagination and failures of nerve.
A Failure of Nerve is when the facts and science point to some conclusion, but it is so outlandish or impractical that people assume it can’t be done.
A Failure of Imagination is when we simply can’t imagine some future development. Maybe because we’re working from faulty assumptions, need a new scientific paradigm, or are blocked by multiple other discoveries or inventions.
When focusing on having more good ideas, we've primarily focused on idea generation which is more about imagination. But there is also alpha in idea application. Ideas need to be implemented or acted on. It's possible that there are ideas that you have, or know of, that are just waiting to be put into practice. Many ideas suffer from something like a failure of nerve: their implications are too ridiculous or inconvenient for most people. If you can stare them in the face, you may as well have had the idea yourself. You help yourself and the world benefit from its application.
Conditions and Courage
Having better ideas often involves creating conditions for them. This means cultivating diverse inputs through conversation, travel, interdisciplinarity, and the like; maintaining (ideally daily!) practices that encourage regular brainstorming without immediate judgment; and perhaps most importantly, developing the courage to recognize and act on ideas. As George Eliot wrote when sending up the self satisfied complacency of a small town: “..the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.” (Middlemarch, Chapter 1) It is an often underappreciated practice of bravery to take ideas seriously.
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