idea generation

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.

Quite often the person who comes to something completely fresh will have in fact the benefit of ignorance in a way. They don’t have the baggage of thinking they know the right way to do it. – Rory Sutherland

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.