idea generation

Ideas and bacteria have a lot in common. You can’t control them. You can’t create them out of thin air. Some are good, and some are bad. But you can design the best possible environment for the good ones to thrive and multiply, and that’s how we want to approach idea generation. We want to approach it like a great fermentation.

Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more

Whatever you pay attention to is being fermented by your brain…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... See more

If you want great ideas, you must remove all the bad ingredients. Outrage, information you don’t care about or can’t act on, trivia, fluff. Obviously, you should keep some fun in your life.