But the truth is that ideas are something that you grow. You plant an idea seed and then you nourish it, and then some parts kind of wither and die off, but then a tree suddenly starts to grow in this random place.

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