Where do ideas come from?

Steve Jobs on happy accidents:

"Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has ... See more

One form of originality is creation. Another form is synthesis.

People often focus so much on creating new ideas that they overlook the value of synthesizing ideas from different sources.

Innovation usually mean connecting previously unconnected concepts.

“Writing is often the process by which you realize you do not understand what you are talking about.”

For an idea to resonate, it needs to do the following:

Something in my subjective experience or previous insight connects to the idea in front of me and gives it potency. The connection between two ideas always carries the possibility of a third, new idea.

It moves me through language. I might find the phrasing particularly harmonious, the choice of ... See more