On Generating Good Ideas

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I have a brilliant friend who has approximately one really good idea per year. He sometimes will take several weeks just to write and think, cancel all meetings, retreat into his room, break out pen and paper, and "start from first principles" or "rethink it all." He's a machine learning researcher whose one big idea usually results in one big paper per year which showcases a new technique or result. This pattern made me think about idea generation more broadly, the pace at which different people produce good, novel ideas, and how we might cultivate our ability to generate them. Researchers and artists are allowed and often expected to have long periods of fallowness punctuated by moments of brilliance or peak productivity. In fact, we sometimes appreciate the slowness of their processes to show the effort that went into an idea. If your ideas are good enough, you don't need that many of them, and for some folks, a long seemingly rest period is needed before the next. Other roles deman

Illustration from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1888) I have a brilliant friend who has approximately one really good idea per year. He sometimes will take several weeks just to write and think, cancel all meetings, retreat into his room, break out pen and paper, and "start from first principles" or "rethink it all." He's a machine learning researcher whose one big idea usually results in one big paper per year which showcases a new technique or result. This pattern made me think about idea generation more broadly, the pace at which different peop

On Generating Good Ideas

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