Ideas

Backlogs are a big weight we don’t need to carry. Dozens and eventually hundreds of tasks pile up that we all know we’ll never have time for. The growing pile gives us a feeling like we’re always behind even though we’re not. Just because somebody thought some idea was important a quarter ago doesn’t mean we need to keep looking at it again and again.

Backlogs are big time wasters too. The time spent constantly reviewing, grooming and organizing old ideas prevents everyone from moving forward on the timely projects that really matter right now.

...It’s easy to overvalue ideas. The truth is, ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and accumulate into big piles.

Really important ideas will come back to you. When’s the last time you forgot a really great, inspiring idea? And if it’s not that interesting—maybe a bug that customers are running into from time to time—it’ll come back to your attention when a customer complains again or a new customer hits it. If you hear it once and never again, maybe it wasn’t really a problem. And if you keep hearing about it, you’ll be motivated to shape a solution and pitch betting time on it in the next cycle.

If large groups are not ideal, what is the perfect group size? A fascinating 2019 study explored this question by looking at citation networks. They found that papers with more authors tend to receive more citations — large teams are good at developing a field. However, they found that the smallest teams — between one and three authors — were significantly more likely to publish disruptive results that could change the course of a field. So, in terms of sheer creativity, smaller groups seem to have an advantage.

With three or more people, group think and social dynamics kick in; there is an audience to impress. Thus, the ideal group may actually be of a minimal size: two. When working with just one other person, one must remain fully focused as the pair iteratively move the discussion forward. Two people who support each other's thinking can travel far in their thinking without getting distracted. With just one other person, it is also easier to be at ease and to enjoy the experience — to get into a state of 'flow'.

Ping Practice is a method for developing a practice of unblocking yourself.

You can think of the method a bit like using a pause button or a camera...

When you notice yourself resonating with or resisting something, the method invites you to name what's giving rise to that sensation and then letting it go.

No categorizing or sensemaking. In these tiny moments, you’re simply creating a breadcrumb for your future self.

...A ping can take on any form: word, phrase, title, rhyme, name, lyric, quote, place, color, texture, melody, idea, feeling, etc.

The most important thing about Pings – and what differentiates them from other thoughts – is that a Ping is language that moves you, "clicks," or otherwise causes you to feel something in your body.

You are likely encountering a Ping if the movement or attraction you sense seems intuitive, automatic, reflexive, and happens without thinking...as if what you are encountering relates to something latent within you.

The half-life of obligation is short; the half-life of guilt is long. Promises never saved one of my side projects, but they clogged many nights and weekends with the gunk of regret. Something had to change.

My friend Jamie Wilkinson once told me about a decision he’d made. No more forever projects, he said. From now on, every project is one-time-only. Treat beginnings like endings: celebrate them, document them, let someone else pick up where you leave off. If the project’s worth repeating, there’s nothing to say you can’t still be the standard-bearer. But at least it’s a choice. By ending well, you give yourself the freedom to begin again.

These days, all my projects start as experiments. No forceful promises, no forever projects. Gravity seeps into the things that stick around.

So I'd like you to think about when was the last time you thought about something for an entire hour? Like nobody bothered you and you had an idea and you sat for an hour and thought about it. How about for a whole day? Does everybody remember the last time they sat and thought about something for a whole day? How about over a course of a month? You had something you were working on and obviously, not spending all the time every day when you started thinking for a month. Or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments if you get to have them at all. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the ability to think about probably three different things for a year or more.

Everything has been composed, just not yet written down.

Today's Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is about iterating early to build the highest quality competitor to an existing idea, not validating a novel one. This journey involves refining early ideas to compete in an existing market, narrowing the target audience, strategically using a waitlist for feedback, and recognizing indicators of early product-market fit.

...Building something valuable is no longer about validating a novel idea as fast as possible. Instead, the modern MVP exercise is about building a version of an idea that is different from and better than what exists today. Most of us aren’t building for a net-new market. Rather, we’re finding opportunities to improve existing categories. We need an MVP concept that helps founders and product leaders iterate on their early ideas to compete in an existing market.

Guerrilla gardening, the act of cultivating plants on land not owned by the gardener, blossomed in the 1970s as a form of activism and ‘community beautification’. It began in New York City with Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, who transformed a derelict private lot into a thriving garden. The movement quickly spread, fueled by a desire to reclaim neglected spaces.

...A simple idea, that was perfectable spreadable.

The Gallery of Concept Visualization features projects which use pictures to communicate complex and difficult ideas, the same way data visualizations use pictures to make sense of data.

Inspired & focused thinking

Muse is a canvas for thinking that helps you get clarity on things that matter. Think in private or collaborate with others.

Each Muse board is like a whiteboard that can hold even more whiteboards. Stay in the ideation flow, worry about organizing later. Your boards grow organically over time, as you develop an idea or work on a project.

We should not worry about crafting and creating the perfect system, but rather just start capturing, taking notes, processing, and gathering things that are important to us. Instead of hunting for the perfect system, we should focus on strengthening the ability to systematically capture and review and deploy our ideas. It is important to remember that the essence of note-taking and journaling lies in the process itself, not in a rigid system or structure. By focusing on capturing and reviewing our ideas consistently, we enhance our ability to make meaningful connections and deepen our understanding of the world around us. Embracing the spontaneity of creativity and the fluidity of our thoughts allows for genuine growth and innovation, rather than being constrained by the limitations of a predefined system.

I guess what you’re describing is like a tweet that hits the uncanny valley of good and bad in such a precise way, with such confidence, that it just pisses everybody off.

Because if you look at this tweet for just a second you’re like ok, that’s a fine bedroom, but then you look at it, and it starts to unravel in your mind, like trying to remember a dream after you just woke up. And you’re like “what is this?” It’s like a deepfake of a person’s face.

…Ok, I’ve got some fire for you: A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea.

The perfect bad tweet is like something you read and you’re like “ok yeah” but then you’re like, “wait…”, and it just starts to come apart in your mind and you’re like that makes no fucking sense, just like this photo of this incredibly bad room.

Most organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life.  It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end.

Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas.  If we’re not careful, the innovation funnel leads to survival of the safest ideas.  

Organizations are good at spotting risks.  In an effort to improve success rates, organizations tend to put sharper teeth in the funnel.

As ideas run the organizational gauntlet, they can get pruned, sheared, shaped, and watered down beyond recognition.  On the way, they can lose the essence of the idea.  They may lose their point of difference and reason for being.

With conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.

When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.

Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.

And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.

The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe them, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.

Remote work seems to be well suited for some kinds of knowledge work, but it’s less clear that it’s well suited for the kind of collaborative creativity that results in breakthrough innovations. A series of new papers suggests breakthrough innovation by distributed teams has traditionally been quite difficult, but also that things have changed, possibly dramatically, as remote collaboration technology has improved.

...There are two key results: complex patents are more likely to be the work of teams. And among patents by a team of inventors, the inventors are more likely to reside in the same city if the patent is more complex. It seems that, at least over 1836-1975, it is hard to do complex work at a distance.

[...But] remote teams have recently begun to produce slightly more disruptive ideas than colocated teams.

Shawn Liu writes at Good Enough:

The next time you’re coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let’s come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.

And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.

That sums it up well. A fair part of why I write every day is because I regularly fall into this rut.

“No, this idea’s no good, that idea’s awful too,” I tell myself. Except now, because I’m writing every day, the dialogue doesn’t end there. There’s a prompt, “…but I have got to publish something today, so I guess it’ll be this bad one.”

More often than not, I find that my initial assessment wasn’t accurate; the idea wasn’t bad at all. It just needed a bit more thought, a bit more energy. And a better one usually comes by the time I press publish.

Any time Miyamoto-san talks about “games” I map this to “websites” in my head. I’m endlessly inspired. These three short paragraphs contain multitudes.

• Find something you want to make that matches up with something the market currently needs.
• Polish and raise your idea to a sufficient level of quality.
• You need clear direction for your idea, even with a talented staff.
• The goal is for each staff member to contribute.
• It’s your job to hold the course and keep to the initial vision.
• Developers getting carried away ends up harming the end product

What’s important to you in the development of a product?

One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease — I’ve seen other people get it too — it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can just go off and make it happen.

The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.

Step 1: Write down the problem in a message you plan to send to a co-worker.

Most of the time you’ll solve the problem before you’re done with Step 1. However, if you complete Step 1 and still have the problem, continue to Step 2.

Step 2: Hit the “Send” button.

Shortly after sending, the solution will present itself. I don’t know why this is. I don’t make the rules. But the solution frequently presents itself after you hit “Send” and no longer need the recipient’s help.

Step 3: Return to message you just sent and follow up with: “Nevermind. Figured it out.”

Ok, ok. This is in jest — a little bit. But it is a good method for getting yourself unstuck.

How do we know what’s the right direction [for computers to take]?

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing.

Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasn’t been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them — we all brought to this effort — a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about intellectual property and the underlying moral and legal issues. In blogging and tweeting about these thoughts, I’ve tended to use the word “borrow”, but at times I’ve used the word “steal” to assert the implicit moral judgment.

...In dancing around the moral and semantic differences between borrowing and stealing, I’ve been missing the greater point. Elliot used the word steal, not for its immoral connotation, but to suggest ownership. To steal something is to take possession of it.

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.

Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

These days I am more interested in the reverse case [of Da Vinci's helicopter]: ideas that could have worked many centuries before they actually appeared. The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these “ideas behind their time”

Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late — and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas aren’t as simple as they appear.

The bicycle is not as straightforward an invention as it seems. To move from ox-hauled cart to human-powered bicycle requires smooth-rolling wheel bearings, which in turn need precisely engineered bearing balls. Modern steel ball bearings were not patented until the late 1700s, and demand from the 19th-century bicycle industry helped to improve their design.

A man was sent to fix a problem with one of our doors. When I encountered him he was enlarging a hole in the door with a grinder so the lock would latch. I looked at the door and noted that that door was not latching because the screws holding the hinges to the door-frame had corroded and the door had dropped. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that he replace the screws in the hinges instead. He looked at me with incomprehension and said, “Look, I’m a lock guy. I’m not a door guy.”

...when you identify so strongly with one particular technology or one tech stack you inherently limit your ability to frame technical problems from alternative angles. You risk becoming fixated on problem solving instead of problem framing.

The difference between problem solving and problem framing is one of intellectual curiosity and attitude. Problem framing often requires a willingness and ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries, to grapple with things that are incongruous or incompatible or simply outside your skillset. A problem cannot be solved—or at least solved well—if it has not first been fully understood, examined, and framed well. And this means developing skill in asking questions. But it’s hard to be curious and ask good questions when you automatically self-identify as “lock folk,” approaching every possible problem as a lock-shaped problem.

If you want to produce the music of the future, ponder the music of the past, then do the opposite.

Creativity gurus have termed this approach looking for the “worst possible idea”. When looking for a business breakthrough, a design innovation or a flash of artistic insight, it can be hard to think of much when challenged to dream up a good idea. Far easier, less intimidating and more fun to write down a list of terrible ideas, then see what those terrible ideas suggest once you turn them on their heads.

Sometimes the worst-idea exercise is little more than a warm-up, getting the imaginative sparks flying before the real creative work begins. Sometimes, however, focusing on what makes an idea bad shines the spotlight on what might make an idea good. If the bad idea is to make a product look clumsy and ugly, that suggests it’s worth paying more attention to the product’s elegance and beauty. If the bad idea is to ship the product with bewildering instructions, the good idea is to hire an editor to hone the instructions.

Even more intriguing is when the bad idea is actually a great idea. Imagine a “worst possible idea” brainstorm for a restaurant. What if the waiters in your restaurant were rude to the customers? Bad idea. Except that was the signature method of Wong Kei’s, located in London’s Chinatown, and the sheer drama of it made Wong Kei’s a popular destination for decades.

Can we use GPT-3 (or its coming descendants) to relieve people of the burden of communicating their ideas, so that they can invest more energy in producing them?

...What I am doing right now, writing this essay, is, technically, a linear walk through the network of my ideas.

That is what writing is: turning a net into a line. But it is also very concretely what I do, since I have externalized my ideas in a note-taking system where the thoughts are linked with hyperlinks. My notes are a knowledge graph, a net of notes. When I sit down to write, I simply choose a thought that strikes me as interesting and use that as my starting point. Then I click my way, linearly, from one note to the next until I have reached the logical endpoint of the thought-line I want to communicate.

...A reader-generated essay is what you get when you can go into someone else’s knowledge graph and make a linear journey through the network, while GPT-5 generates a just-in-time essay that is human-readable. It would be like going on a Wikipedia spree, except that the posts are written the moment you read them, based on facts encoded in a knowledge graph, and the user interface makes it look like you are reading a single, very long, and meandering essay.

I loved the 2014 movie The Guest for (1) its central perfor­mance by Dan Stevens and (2) its synth-soaked sound­track.

Here is The Guest II, sound­track to a sequel that doesn’t exist, assembled by the same people who made the original!

There should probably be more sound­tracks to films that don’t exist, right? I am recalling Wes Anderson’s method, in his early years, of assem­bling a sound­track first, then imagining the movie that could contain all those tunes …

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

I couldn’t seem to convince my writers that I was genuinely ok working with a super rough first draft — i.e., that I’d harbor no hidden judgment about their intelligence, commitment, or excellence at their craft.

So I came up with a new word. “Just give me a v0.crap.” (Pronounced “version zero dot crap”.)

v.0.crap works because it’s attuned to the psychology of the situation. It’s punching through our innate desire not to “look bad”, plus years of corporate conditioning that tells us not to share less-than-polished work. It’s easier for people used to delivering exceptional work to feel they’ve exceeded the goal of “crap”; they can sit comfortably in “good enough for the current purpose.”

An ex-Apple interface designer’s 40-year plan to redesign not just the way we use computers, but the way we think with them.

a website with a thermostat
a website that floats in through the window
a website that is often partially shaded
a website that isn't sorry
a website with a courtyard

A non-obvious idea will take longer to come to fruition (as compared to a derivative of an existing idea or an obvious idea). To emphasize [Paul] Graham’s point: if it were obvious and good, it would have been done already.

We live in an age when it is so easy to "start something new" — newsletters, e-commerce stores, software apps — that people are willing to walk away from a venture at the first sign of friction. With non-obvious (or bad-sounding) ideas, there will be a lot of friction. Most people will not understand the idea. And when people don't understand an idea, they tend to criticize it and think of all the ways it could fail.

It takes a long time to develop non-obvious ideas, and it also takes a long time for the world to understand them.

Build tools to organize ideas, time, money and other stuff.

Tap can prompt you for information and send you summaries of what you collected. Combining the workflow tools with different data elements, you can build exactly what you need.

...Save records to Tap via text message (SMS), Telegram Messenger, the website, bookmarklet, or API.

He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.

Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.

In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.

Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.

Methodically noting and filing resources is a sign of a mature and deliberate craftsman—it is an investment into future learning and projects. Before long, you will begin to reach the point where this collection generates projects and ideas with minimal effort; previously isolated ideas are consolidated and curiousity spurred on.

There are a lot of things I’d like to make — maybe you can help! Please let me know if:

• you know of an existing solution to one of the following ideas
• you have suggestions/pointers about a relevant technique/approach
• you want to have a product design chat or pair programming session — I love collaborating with people, so definitely let me know!

What is this obsession with tracking down the source of things, anyway?

...Maybe it’s about the journey: tracking the original source means following a breadcrumb of links. Every stop along the way is also a fork in the road, except in this case the fork is really a node connected to, potentially, hundreds of hundreds of other nodes. And sure, you can keep on the path to the destination, but you can also take a detour, or two, or a hundred.

...And then, maybe you write about what you saw and the connections you made, and add another dot to that ever expanding knowledge graph.

It's not teams that are the problem, it's the rabid insistence on teamwork. Group think. Committee decisions.

Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.

In the first year, a perennial will focus on its foundation, anchoring its roots, so it can survive dormancy in the winter.

The second year, the plant comes out of dormancy and starts to grow, both up and down — “you can expect to see blooms, though the plant hasn’t quite reached its full size or full flowering potential.”

In the third year, the plant takes off and comes into full form.

Another gardening metaphor we can use for creative work!

So many of my projects tend to follow this sleep, creep, leap structure.

Each person in the pair takes a distinct and complementary stance toward the design problem as they work together. One generates solutions. That is, one individual materializes solutions to the problem at hand for discussion and iteration. The other synthesizes the proposed solutions.

New ideas would come about by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde.

A planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does not follow through on them. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.

To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.

It’s all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you can’t settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out.

If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.

The contrast between man’s ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged—half imprisoned, this is man!

[Inventions] do not spring fully formed from the mind of some maker, but, rather, become shaped and reshaped through the (principally negative) experiences of their users within the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they are embedded.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.