Cultivating a State of Mind Where New Ideas Are Born

Pablo Picasso: “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

If you are just four people in your own door, an

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Schiller answers a friend who complains of his lack of creativeness in the following words: “The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intelligence imposes upon your imagination ... It does not seem beneficial, and it is harmful for the creative work of the mind, if the intelligence inspects too closely the id... See more

Being highly impressionable and introverted, he is crafting a defiant personality in the notebooks, a protective gear that allows his larval ideas to live, even those who seem too banal

Pablo Picasso: “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” James Baldwin: “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” Bob Dylan: “To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed.”

Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

The idea of needing to "linger in confusion" reminded me of a passage I like from Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams', where he's introducing the idea of free association and quotes some remarks by Schiller: "At a point in his correspondence ... Schiller answers a friend who complains of his lack of creativeness in the following words: “The reas... See more

The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin ... See more