Brain Food: Great Ideas Thrive in Silence

So let’s start with ingredients. How do we cultivate the right ingredients for great idea fermenting?

III: Ingredients

There are two levels of thinking going on in our heads at any time. There’s the more active and conscious part of your brain that’s reading this article and which you think of as doing the “thinking.” Then a subconscious, processin... See more

Our ideas, too, will disappoint us if we don’t give them the right environment to develop in. They’ll be shallow, derivative, dull, repetitive, or take too long to show up. Or they’ll just not show up at all. We must find the perfect glass jar and lid for them to appear in.

What is that perfect glass jar, though? Our ideas appear primarily in one s... See more

Famously, when Gmail came along, Google told us to stop trying to organize (and delete) our email and instead just rely on search to find what we’re looking for. Broadly I’d say that approach has worked well, and in the vast majority of cases, I err on the side of risking losing track of something later instead of spending the time to organize it n

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