The ways we fail at this are obvious. We never give ourselves output time because we’re terrified of silence and boredom. We need a podcast while working out. We need music while working. We keep social media up in another tab. We have notifications on our phones. We let ourselves be interrupted.

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.

Whatever you pay attention to is being fermented by your brain. It doesn’t understand that refining your lysergic acid derivatives is more important than whether or not Shanae will find someone new before the next rose ceremony. If you pay attention to it, it’s going in the fermentation jar.

Output time is creating the space and boredom for those inputs to ferment into something interesting. Staring at a blank page of your journal, opening a document to start writing, going for a (no headphones) walk with a notebook, working out without music, or sitting in the sauna. However you create bored, quite space for your brain to finally get

Good ideas require boredom . If you constantly ingest new information, the existing information can never be digested. It’s as if you’re looking at your fermenting jar on the counter every hour and wondering why nothing has happened, so you open it and stuff in another cucumber.

These are the three necessary criteria for a great ferment: great ingredients, the proper environment, and patience. Without them, you will fail to create something funky and wonderful. With them, your creativity is the only constraint.

But if you want to come up with useful brain farts that move your life forward, you will have to stop feeding your mailroom dog shit. Garbage in, garbage out.