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.

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.

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.

You're bound to get idears if you go thinking bout stuff. -Grapes of Wrath

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