Every tweet you read, every newspaper you glance at, every show you watch, every email you skim, it’s all feeding your subconscious things to process . And whatever it’s fed, it will ferment into ideas and reactions. So if you want to come up with better ideas, you must get extremely strict about what you let in the door.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If your first response to boredom is to seek out another input to sate the longing for stimulation, then your brain never has to make shit up to entertain you. The idea muscles will atrophy and never produce anything of worth. But if you can respond to boredom by leaning into it, keeping the blank page open, and seeing what pops out, the muscle

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.

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.

What makes fermentation so magical is that the most important ingredient is the one you can’t control: the bacteria. You don’t add a bunch of bacteria to the pickle jar. They multiply from what’s already in the ingredients you chose. Your job is not to make them or add them or send them strongly worded emails until they do your bidding. Your job is