✨ Where great ideas come from
by Tejas Gawande · updated 12d ago
✨ Where great ideas come from
- The framework for Strategic Intuition calls the moment before a creative spark a state of ‘presence of mind’, a moment in which diffuse-mode thinking connects the dots. Research suggests this is a pretty common occurrence:
In a 2019 study, 98 professional writers and 87 physicists recorded their most creative idea each day, as well as what they wer
... See morefrom Working Without Working: The Creative Night Shift
Tejas Gawande added 23d ago
- One way to rationalize this is that after being in the driver’s seat of such a large-scale, fast-paced effort, it’s hard for people to do nothing at all or go back to working for someone else. So pursuing something that can’t scale is a happy medium — maintaining full autonomy and control without the stress of chasing scale (and all that comes with... See more
from Pursuits That Can’t Scale | Theory No. 31 by Anu Atluru
Tejas Gawande added 2mo ago
Chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale
- Companionship content is the most durable in its closeness to human experience, to being around people . When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.
- While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to b
from Companionship Content is King by Anu Atluru
Tejas Gawande added 2mo ago
Companionship content is more human. It is like being in a long, stimulating conversation with a group of friends.
Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.
Companionship content isn’t consumed just for information or entertainment, but as a proxy for having company around, a way to mitigate the awareness of lacking it, or to make an otherwise dull task enjoyable — with a companion.
- Where will we see luxury software transform markets? Already, in the consumer productivity space, we’re starting to see “luxury” email clients, calendars, browsers, and search engines emerge. While all of these capabilities are freely accessible to consumers and rather commoditized, companies like Superhuman for email, Cron (now Notion) for calenda... See more
from Disruptive Interfaces & the Rise of Luxury Software by Scott Belsky
Tejas Gawande added 12d ago
Luxury software. In the world of luxury software, designers will shift from being “interface builders” to “software artists.”
Great ideas come from stretching our imagination and focusing on the core need. How can we improve performance for people who spend the most time doing X or care about how they are perceived doing X?
- People who read widely and attentively—and then publish the results of their reading—are also arguably performing research as a leisure activity. Maria Popova, who started writing a blog in 2006—now called The Marginalian —which collects her reading across literature, philosophy, psychology, the sciences. Her blog feels like leisurely research, to ... See more
from research as leisure activity by Celine Nguyen
Tejas Gawande added 18d ago
- Exceptional people grow up in exceptional milieus
This seems to be true for >95 percent of the people I looked at.
These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exception... See morefrom Childhoods of exceptional people
Tejas Gawande added 17d ago
The adults had high expectations of the children; they assumed they had the capacity to understand complex topics, and therefore invited them into serious conversations and meaningful work, believing them capable of growing competent rapidly.
- Or, as Nietzsche put it in an aphorism cited by Oppezzo and Schwartz, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
I wouldn’t go so far, but the spirit of the sentiment seems true enough. I’ve lately heard a great deal about how writing is a form of thinking. There is a stronger sense in which one could take that claim, but it at least means... See morefrom The Ambling Mind
Tejas Gawande added 2mo ago
Paul Graham (@paulg) on how to do great work. I used to be stuck at the third point a lot and reading this helped me immensely. https://t.co/qaZt7VsVVYTejas Gawande added 1mo ago
Natural aptitude x Deep interest
“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit
... See morefrom YouTube: The Learning Machine
Tejas Gawande added 2mo ago