idea generation

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.

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

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