idea generation

If you want to increase the quality of your work – your output – you must increase the level of your inputs. Your input is knowledge.

What humans do best is see information in our environment, synthesize it, and connect it with related ideas in novel ways. But it’s much harder for us to come up with something out of nothing. It helps a lot to have something to react to.

Our ideas appear primarily in one situation: when little else is occupying our thoughts…Good ideas require boredom. If you constantly ingest new information, the existing information can never be digested.