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

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.

Our ideas appear primarily in one situation: when little else is occupying our thoughts. It’s as if it is a defense mechanism of our brain responding to the lack of stimulus.

What matters is cutting out all the noise and replacing it with the high-quality ingredients you want your brain working on.

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.

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.

Find the best ingredients possible to ferment into great ideas, and aggressively prune everything you don’t want your brain to process.

Give your brain the boredom and output time it needs to figure out what to do with that information. Don’t keep opening the jar and packing more into it.

Finally, be patient with the process. The more you can reduce

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.