idea generation

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.

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... See more

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

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

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.