Thoughts & Ideas
On Greatness
v0.crap
- ââWriting, Brieflyââ
Shaped and reshaped
A distinct and complementary stance
But bulldozers move mountains
Argue against the best
Half-winged, half-imprisoned
Curiosity spurred on
From one Arte to another
The Innovation Funnel
The power of One
An Article by Kathy SierraIt'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.
A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea
AÂ Fragment by Ryan BroderickI guess what youâre 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 youâre like ok, thatâs 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 youâre like âwhat is this?â Itâs like a deepfake of a personâs face.
âŠOk, Iâve 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 youâre like âok yeahâ but then youâre like, âwaitâŠâ, and it just starts to come apart in your mind and youâre like that makes no fucking sense, just like this photo of this incredibly bad room.
The McDonaldâs Theory of Creativity
An Article by Jon BellI use a trick with co-workers when weâre trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonaldâs.
An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we canât possibly go to McDonaldâs, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!
Itâs as if weâve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonaldâs Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.
Eulogy for Steve Jobs
An Article by Jonathan IveHe 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.
- ââSteve Jobsââ
Ideas behind their time
An Article by Tim HarfordThese 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 âideas behind their timeâ
Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late â and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas arenât 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.
Negative Creativity
An Article by Scott AlexanderComing up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.
Early work
An Essay by Paul GrahamImagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
An Essay by Paul GrahamI 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.
The still life effect
AÂ Fragment by Paul GrahamIf 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.
A lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith 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 â and honest.
Our illustration of an âideaâ 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 âwords in disguiseâ. Take a common illustration for âideaâ 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 âideaâ. 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 â they are empty.
Understanding Understanding
A dot went for a walk
A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.
Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.
The dot had embraced understanding.
Understanding precedes action.
Each of us is a dot on a journey.Admitting ignorance
The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't know something. Striving to be the dumbest person in the room.
When you donât have to filter your inquisitiveness through a smoke screen of intellectual posturing, you can genuinely receive or listen to new information. If you are always trying to disguise your ignorance of a subject, you will be distracted from understanding it.
Information imposters
Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we donât take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.
My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to âcook until done.â This doesnât tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.
Michaelangelo's hammer
A young man named Michelangelo stands in front of a huge granite monolith. He stands there at a time in history before the technologies that brought us the hammer and chisel have occurred. He gazes at the rock. He dreams his dream and the best that he is able to say is, What a wonderful stone you are.
âŠ
Michaelangelo now stands in front of the same rock. Thrust into his hands are a hammer in one and a chisel in the other. He looks at his hands, at the technological tools that they hold, and gazing at the same stone, with epiphanic zeal, says I must let Moses out.
I won't get
If I don't ask, I won't get.
Talking with Clinton
When you are talking with Clinton, he is not looking over your shoulder to see who else is in the room. You can tell he is not thinking about how he is going to respond to you. He is there, present and listening.
By the way, when you scramble the letters in the word listen, it becomes a new word: silent. Weâre so often wrapped up in our own self-talk, we forget to listen and learn the information in the first placeâŠand you canât remember or understand something you never observed.
Scales of change
To understand revolutionary change in its full complexity â not just what happened, but why it happened â we need a model that works across multiple scales, and the disciplines that traverse them.
The method
Well no, see, thatâs the tricky part. I always try to come up with things that when they find out the method, the method is as interesting as the effect itself. â David Blaine
Selling your own ignorance
When you sell your expertise - and what I mean by sell is to move ahead in a corporation, or sell an idea to a publisher, or sell an ability to a client - by definition, youâre selling from a limited repertoire.
However, when you sell your ignorance to move ahead, when you sell your desire to create and explore and navigate paths to knowledge, when you sell your curiosity - you sell from a bucket with an infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire. And, you sell in a way thatâs not intimidating, in a way that joins the explanation to the fascination that comes with understanding.
You only understand something relative to something you already understand
A good question is better than a brilliant answer
The eyes of a traveler
Weâve all heard that travel broadens the mind. But beneath this clichĂ© lies a deep truth. Things stand out because theyâre different, so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to two you pay at a restaurant. We learn a lot when we travel, not because we are any smarter on the road but because we pay such close attention. On a trip, we become our own version of Sherlock Holmes, intensely observing the environment around us. We are continuously trying to figure out a world that is foreign and new.
Too often, we go through our day-to-day life on cruise control, oblivious to huge swaths of our surroundings. To notice friction points â and therefore opportunities to do things better â it helps to see the world with fresh eyes. When you meet creative people with lots of ideas constantly bubbling to the surface, you often come away feeling that they are operating on a different frequency. And they are, most of the time. They have all their receptors on â and frequently turned up to eleven. But the fact is, we are all capable of this mode. Try to engage a beginnerâs mind. For kids, everything is novel, so they ask lots of questions, and look at the world wide-eyed, soaking it all in. Everywhere they turn, they tend to think, Isnât that interesting? rather than, I already know that.
By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a beginnerâs mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you might normally have overlook. You put aside assumptions and are fully immersed in the world around you. In this receptive mode, youâre ready to start actively searching out inspiration.
Cart before the horse
It seemed to him that in pursuit of an all-purpose, all-serving health care plan, the country was designing an ocean liner before it even understood why boats float.
The What and the How
How many aspects of problem solving and design solutions are there? Many, many might answer.
But there are actually just two: What to do and how to do it.
Before anything else, before you consider how youâre going to get it done or how much youâll have to pay for it or how youâll get permission to do it â before anything else, you have to decide what you want. You have to decide what kind of place you want to live in, what kind of community, what kind of city.
We donât pay enough attention to the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it.
Thinking with the hand
The idea of thinking with your hands is not the exclusive domain of sculptors or engineers. In healthcare, for exams, surgeons have a powerful link between the head and the hands. Of course, like all healthcare professionals, their work involves a lot of deep knowledge and understanding. But itâs not all in their brain. If you were in medical school, learning to be a surgeon, for example, would you want your professor to be someone who writes about surgery or would you rather be taught by a surgeon? Many surgeons donât publish scholarly articles. They spent time perfecting their skill with their hands. In some ways, the relationship between surgery and the larger field of medicine is analogous to the relationship between design and the larger field of engineering. Designers â and design thinkers âoften think with their hands.
A pattern of understandings
The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made. â Richard Benson
#15
How different am I, making clock number 15, from the process of natural selection laboring under changing conditions to generate the biological constructs? That ancient evolutionary system works on the basis of trial and error repeated in huge numbers over immense spans of time, with the failures discarded and the successes retained. At times it seems to me that my clock making is quite similar, as my mind, just barely thinking, sorts through huge numbers of possibilities and discards them as failures before even trying them, so the few that are made have a pretty good chance of success. Is this foresight some form of understanding? I think not. No revelation here, just enough thinking to spur the maker on to cut some piece of metal which, once made, might fail or succeed. Yet â in either case â the thing made and its creation remains the sole root of any real understanding that takes place. The clock is crude but gets built, and even in its base simplicity teaches its maker how to understand what must be understood for something to be made. â Richard Benson
A classroom without walls
The city is education â and the architecture of education rarely has much to do with the building of schools. The city is a schoolhouse, and its ground floor is both bulletin board and library. The graffiti of the city are its window displays announcing themselves, telling about what theyâre doing and why and where theyâre doing it. Everything we do â if described, made clear, and made observable â is education: the Show and Tell, the city itself. It is a classroom without walls, an open university for people of all ages offering a boundless curriculum with unlimited expertise. If we can make our urban environment comprehensible and observable, we will have created classrooms with endless windows on the world.