Creativity

Honour your creativity

In many ways, I feel fortunate that we built Poolsuite, Vacation® and other projects before AI became as accessible as it is now. That time gave me a runway to hone the skill of being creative. But the other day, I found myself slipping into a terrible new habit, and turning to ChatGPT before I even gave my brain 30 seconds to... See more

How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.

But my core work — the stuff that gets me up early in the mornings and keeps me up late at night — happens much before those products are publicly released. It’s in the research: the process of finding interesting questions that seem to go ignored, getting to the root of the topic, exploring many possible answers, building up the most promising one... See more

To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.

The original Ford Model T had more than 100 square feet of wood in it. Multiplied by millions of cars, it was a tremendous amount of lumber and produced a tremendous amount of scrap wood and sawdust.

Henry Ford, ever the entrepreneur, wondered what he could do with the scraps. He settled on turning it into charcoal.

Thus began the Kingsford Charcoal ... See more

The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning... See more