Source of great ideas
Where do great ideas originate? What is genius? Why do some people seem to come up with ideas easily and effortlessly?
People spend a lot of time examining their brains, studying their habits and trying to copy their practices. Genius and creativity are usually considered to be the properties of a particular person and some people think that their own productivity can be improved by copying certain aspects of their behavior. “How to engineer your life to enable creativity?” I think it is worth spending some time thinking about this question.
The myth
There is a tendency to anthropomorphize the flow of history. To tell stories that privilege the point of view of particular human beings. Stories where there is a hero and there is a great problem and with heroic struggle the hero conquers the problem.
As much as this story appeals to our emotional selves, it is finally a story that at best offers only a partial picture of the process that is involved in discovering great principles. Every picture, every model and every theory by necessity has to be incomplete. But the utility of a model lies in its ability to make valuable predictions about the future. In its ability to help ourselves make an impact by following the directives of the model.
If you measure the utility of models, of theories and stories in this particular way, then there is some harm in this particular method of story-telling. Of telling stories that emphasize the importance of the individual and the inner mind in the story of discoveries.
A story like that will motivate people to work hard and try to focus on themselves and what is going on within themselves. To focus on their feelings, perceptions and thought patterns. This reflexive pattern of thinking and the disconnect from the real world it can create can cause feedback loops to develop that can lead people along paths that make them unhappy in the long run. For example, someone might be depressed because he is not effective. This might cause the person to withdraw from engaging with the problems and to distract himself with counter-productive behavior intended to temporarily relieve the bad feeling. This can range from self-destructive behavior like making excuses for poor decisions, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol or trying to feel better by pulling other people down. All these things make the problems worse in the long run. This might go on until the person passes the point of no return.
The possible truth
But the secret to creativity or success doesn’t lie within. It lies without. Great ideas can never be derived from existing principles. They are almost always the product of random events and mistakes. Rationality, mathematical reasoning and straight-forward thinking can act only as a negative filter. It can tell you what will not work. It cannot lead you step-by-step to the next great discovery.
The process of innovation is inherently non-linear, chaotic and unpredictable. The key to coming up with great ideas is to leave some space in our lives for luck to work. Make sure the environment you are in is dynamic, fluid and dangerous to the extent that it will not kill you. Keep pushing your boundaries and never plan too much.
Some people might read this and think that hard work and planning is useless. That is entirely the wrong message. Hard work, extreme dedication and a certain kind of planning are required for success in life. The question is how you should work and what you should focus on.
Here is my take on these most important questions:
You have to work hard on developing your store of knowledge and the basic skills and intuition required to recognize a great idea when you see one. We go through our lives every day unconsciously doing incredibly complicated and clever things without realizing their significance or their practical applications in other areas of life.
People might have been rubbing their hands together for millennia to warm themselves. But it was only recently that somebody documented the fact that heat might not be related to combustion and that the coincidence hides a deeper mystery about the physics of heat. That recognition is what is important. Not the rubbing together of hands. Ideas have to be recognized and articulated using the language of technology for that idea to get developed into a practical application.
People knew about the law of large numbers for ages. And at least intuitively everyone understands the principle of averaging to reduce noise. But someone applied this prehistoric idea after combining it with the concept of the information content of a random process to a sequence of bits and he became the “Father of information theory”. Another guy applied it to economics and that became the “Efficient market hypothesis”.
Einstein was sitting in a patent office and going through countless papers discussing clever things and he was reading material describing results from experiments that other people were doing. Again and again people were implying that the speed of light didn’t seem to change no matter how you measured it. He just articulated clearly what everyone was implying and then proceeded to use straight-forward mathematical techniques to work out all the potential implications and on reconciling it with the existing frame-work of physics.
Now, after the fact, people are studying Einstein’s brain size, anecdotes from his child-hood, grade cards from school and his musical predilections and trying to copy all these things in an effort to become an Einstein themselves.
Maybe if I grow my hair, look weird and play the violin, I might change physics as we know it today? Maybe. But your chances will be lot better if you try to replicate the essential features of Einstein’s environment and his natural curiosity instead of some superficial personal characteristics or other incidental details of his personal history. Myth-making and story-telling are fun. But sometimes they can mislead young minds into thinking that being weird in a particular way is what it takes to become special.
Before wondering why you can’t come up with something like the theory of relativity while watching cricket and eating chips have you first made sure that you have access to the same quality and quantity of privileged information that Einstein did?
When Feynman hit a dead end in his career he didn’t sit down and try harder to come up with something new. He just said, ” If I can’t solve this problem right now I will not waste my time keeping on trying again and again until I am fully extinguished. Instead I will find some other way to make myself useful and in the process, maybe, learn something new. I will teach! When I explain things to other people I will be forced to look at things from their point of view and the fresh perspective might help me get some new ideas!”(paraphrased, obviously!)
He understood something about the state of mind required to solve problems that require an oblique approach and how to achieve it. The kind of things that you can do which can help you achieve a state of flow. Where your ego expands to include the problem and you feel connected and everything just sort of happens automatically.
There is no harm in trying to emulate great people. But if you look at the wrong things you might just wind up wasting time on music lessons and dressing in turtle necks without actually accomplishing anything in life.
The mother lode
Every great idea in science and technology is basically the recognition of a pattern that was identified in some other area like humanities which deals with the study of naturally occurring complexity and patterns. The reason for it is very simple. Nature has the right mix of noise injection(random mutations and disasters) and diversity of cost and fitness functions that has been allowed to operate for billions of years. This has resulted in complexity, patterns and innovations of stunning and breath-taking beauty and power. By developing your arsenal of mathematical and scientific tools that can be used to reject spurious patterns and see through correlations that can sometimes obscure chains of causation we can exploit this nearly infinite mine of ideas to come up with stuff that can shock and awe people.
To properly take advantage of this gift of optionality you must work hard. Not on coming up with great ideas, but on learning to recognize one when you see it. When the idea is seductive enough the aggression required to capture, subdue, exploit and control it will come automatically.
The simplicity of the idea doesn’t matter. What matters is the scale of application of that idea. And scale requires a proper appreciation and grasp of all the essential features of that idea and the ability to ignore the unimportant details. In other words, be able to articulate the idea in the most general terms possible. And then, hold it in your head at all times and recognize diverse situations where it can be applied to make a difference.
Prepare yourself for the moment of insight as well as you can. It can feel overwhelming when it strikes you. Keep developing newer ways of looking at the same phenomenon. And, most importantly,
“leave enough space in your life for luck to work its magic”.
Point-Counterpoint 