Ideas sometimes seem to need days or weeks or months to get to a point where they feel fully formed. If you try to force a solution to a problem into a preset window of time, you will almost certainly reach a suboptimal solution.

I’ll often have ideas sitting in my focus folder for weeks or months and keep tossing thoughts into them, and then one... See more

It reminds me of writing and how I wake up week after week and get stuck on the blank page again and again. How I always despair that I have no more good ideas and, even if I did, not enough eloquence to convey said ideas. But I love it still. I love how writing brings everything to the surface, how it generates and absorbs my attention. How it

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Everything that you see in the world—whether it's a tool or a story—first existed as a seed in someone's mind. And I think that people often assume that ideas are something that you get, like a diamond, or something like that. But the truth is that ideas are something that you grow. You plant an idea seed and then you nourish it, and then some... See more

The mathematical genius Alexander Grothendieck once had a metaphor for solving problems. He suggested that instead of forcing open an impossibly hard kernel with a hammer and chisel, one should simply let it sit in water and wait. Over time, the shell softens and opens with ease. This is also true in writing; time is the only non-substitutable... See more

A writing example: when I look back in my notes I realize so much of what I write about today I was ruminating about 2-3 years ago. I always knew what I was going to say. I just didn’t have the tools, I didn’t have the maturity, I didn’t have the language or sensitivity to beauty to recognize what that was. So much of what I learned was latent,... See more