Where Good Ideas Come From

Look around you, every part of your environment is designed - that is to say, every building, furniture piece, and artwork started out as an idea before it was created and put out into the world. Good ideas are abundant, they are the seeds from which progress grows, they shape our cities, cultures, and futures. Ideas are also the currency of creatives and innovators, without them we have nothing. Consequently, we make it our business to inhabit a state of open curiosity.

When it comes to generating good ideas, many struggle with inspiration. In today’s newsletter, we’ll explore how good ideas can be cultivated at will, through concepts from Steven Johnson’s 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From.

The Adjacent Possible

In any system, be it cultural or biological, there are a finite number of possibilities that can change the direction of the game. If you imagine a simple game of chess, there are limited moves that you can make depending on the position of the pieces. Those potential moves can be defined as the adjacent possible, a number of potential directions that can be taken.

The idea of the adjacent possible can be applied to ideas as well. In the 1800’s the idea of social media would’ve been impossible to fathom, because the underlying technology was simply not feasible at the time. However, by the 1990’s you could start to conceptualise digital spaces, given the invention of the internet and the exchange of digital information across networks. This latent possibility, the adjacent possible, is the cause of novel & radical innovations.

Application

The adjacent possible is a useful framework for understanding unrealised potential. In any given moment, there are a limited options of how ideas can come into the world - the game for creators is to always be operating at the bleeding edge of those possibilities. This is where unique ideas come from.

To take advantage of the adjacent possible, stay abreast of changes in your environment and embrace changes as they come. Become sensitive to new ways of seeing. Do not strive for the radical from the get-go, instead, build on what you know, push boundaries slightly, and let new prospects make themselves apparent to you.

The Slow Hunch

The best ideas come to us as a flash of new awareness, they strike like hot lightning and thrust us into a state of momentary euphoria. We romanticise this type of inspiration because it’s the most dramatic way ideas make themselves apparent to us, and it makes for a good story - “I was walking down the street, when suddenly it hit me..” we’ve all heard this phrase.

In reality, good ideas lay dormant deep in our subconscious for days, weeks & months until the right connections click. At that moment you experience the flash of new neural connections. This is the slow hunch.

Application

Optimising for lightbulb moments is possible, if we cultivate the right conditions to allow for random connections to take place. Here are some ways to keep ideas brewing in the subconscious.

Build A Second Brain

Building a second brain means creating a digital space where you can store information for later use and repurpose. Personally I keep a second brain full of random notes, podcasts and learning that I come across in life but don’t yet have a use for. There’s a great book on this by Tiago Forte with the same title. The idea here is that you want an accesible library of all the important information you gather through your life, one that you can return to whenever the need arises. Many people use Notion or Evernote or any cloud-based text editor to store information. A second brain should make it easy to capture and retrieve bits of information at will.

Read Everything

In order to cultivate unique and interesting ideas, you have to expose yourself to many ways of thinking. The best way to do that is by gathering many points of view, through reading. Whether it’s through newsletters, audiobooks or novels, read everything and treat your learning as if you are a data miner. The goal is to find interesting bits of information that stand out to you for whatever reason. It will help you build a backlog of ideas that can later be connected to other ideas to make something unique.

Serendipity

Luck plays a larger role in life that we’d care to admit. When it comes to good ideas, chaos & randomness allows for chance encounters between ideas to take place. The more randomness, the more opportunity there is for serendipity to take place.

Application

In a world characterised by chaos, you want to make a habit of creating your own luck. In order to do that you have to be prolific in a number of different networks and actively work outside of the margins.

In this short podcast, Naval talks about the many ways to cultivate your own luck. I love the idea that by stirring the pot and putting yourself out there, you create conditions where luck finds you. Fortune favours the bold, as the old adage says.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll leave you with this wonderful quote.

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." — W.B. Yeats