How to have good ideas

a framework for effective ideation

Every now and then I have a good idea. Here’s how I think about having them.

1. Have lots of ideas

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
–Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize (2x)

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.
–Paul Graham, How To Get Startup Ideas

Ideation is a skill, and like any skill you don’t improve unless you practice.

So practice having ideas about everything, all the time.

If you do this often enough you will be able to turn this into a habitual “ideation program” that runs as a continuous background mental process.

2. Believe an ideal solution exists

They can conquer who believe they can.
–Virgil

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
–Steve Jobs

One of the most important parts of your ideation program is the belief that something better exists.

Try to instill a reflexive habit in yourself to look for a better version of everything you encounter (within your areas of interest), that you simply have to find. Try to derive this through analogy, first principles, or just research whenever you can.

3. Accrete interesting knowledge

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
–Haruki Murakami

My approach to problem-solving is to carry around a dozen interesting problems, and a dozen interesting solutions to unrelated problems, and eventually, I’ll be able to make connections. […]. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state.
–Richard Feynman

The best way to have valuable ideas is to understand the entire landscape of a field and figure out what can emerge now that couldn’t before.
–Sam Altman

Once you have your ideation program set up, the next step is to give it the right fuel.

Talk to interesting people, read interesting books, collect interesting problems. Do weird things, follow strange thinkers, explore opposites. Look for patterns, connections, and isomorphisms across these and the areas you care about.

Treat your information diet like a professional athlete does their training.

4. Write down everything

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
–David Allen

You might be surprised by how many ideas you have once you commit to writing each and every one down. Most will be bad. Some might be ok. Others may be a piece of a good idea, or a half-turn away from a great one.

If you don’t commit to writing them down though you can’t learn from them or build off them. On top of that, writing down each idea is a signal to yourself that you are committed to having better ideas, and will help make that so.

5. Develop your idea taste

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
–Ira Glass

Set up a process to review your ideas often. Learn to calibrate your idea quality. Especially in the beginning most ideas will be terrible and unoriginal. If you stick with it though then you may gradually ideate your way in to new, uncharted realms of human creativity.

The mark of a good idea is that you’re still obsessed with it one month, two months, three months… after the aha moment, and that it survives the sunlight of conversations with intelligent friends or sharing it publicly.

As you practice having ideas, you might also learn that you can develop intuition for where good ideas lie. Beautiful, rich fields of proto-ideas are awaiting harvest just beyond your horizons! Follow your curiosity and excitement. Read the histories of the great ideas. Learn to recognize the patterns of things that precede them.

The goal is to teach your ideation model to have more good ideas and less bad ones through feedback and reinforcement.

Then be patient, forget what you’ve learned, and let it sink into your blood.

6. Make space for ideation

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
–Pablo Picasso

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
–Friedrich Nietzsche

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
–Amos Tversky

Once you have your ideation program running smoothly and calibrated well, the last step is to allow it abundant mental space and overhead to operate in.

A certain amount of chaos is good for creativity but if your mind is too cluttered or distracted it will probably hurt more than it helps.

Let yourself become bored. Solvitur ambulando: go on long, meandering walks. Let your mind drift before bed with a pen or recording device nearby.

The best ideas arise when your mind is full of interesting thoughts, and calm enough to forge them into something new.

7. Embrace uncertainty

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.
–Henrik Karlsson, Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

Creativity loves uncertainty.

8. [Bonus] Take lots of showers

This is my personal hack, to the point where if I’m feeling stuck in my life I’ll consciously make an effort to take more/longer showers. I already take two relatively long showers every day and I’d say at least 50% of the time I get out with at least a few ideas to journal or write about, try at my company, or read more about.

The idea for my current company was a shower thought. Some of the best decisions I’ve made while there have originated in the shower as well.

The only other place I have a similar amount of ideas is at a specific type of heated power yoga classes my gym does. It’s intense enough to occupy most of my mind, but meditative enough to allow for some wandering which seems to be a fertile ground for creativity.