Tag: ideas

Categories
Writing

Everything goes in the queue

The queue is more of a scrapbook than a notebook. It’s a hopper of brain farts and observations brewing in all formats: text, images, video, and sound. It’s…

  • Where ideas get stored and intermix
  • Where content molds and takes shape
  • Where visions incubate until the timing is ripe
  • Where some concepts never the day of light

Your goal is to never let the queue go empty. You should always keep refreshing it with new content to help you sustain your thinking presence. The dull, the interesting, the ephemeral; it all goes into the Tumblr bin to age marvelously.

“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.

Field Notes

Take copious notes and frequently revisit them. In generating novelty, you’ll always be two steps ahead.

Categories
Creativity Life & Philosophy

About those light bulb moments

gif by @benny-box

Ideas spawn as soon as you stop thinking about them, and only after you experimented and done your research. After the work’s been done, the best thing you can do is allow your ideas to bake. Sleep on them. Turn your focus to something else while your brain connects all the neurons and turns them into thoughts.

Turning off your brain is just as important as turning it on. Ideas emerge when you stop thinking and step away from the work. If you can’t step away from the day to day, you’ll never let the mind wander into different things that may offer the missing piece to your solution.

When you let go of thinking and do nothing on purpose, thinking finds you. It finds you in the shower, in the gym, or in the car. Eureka! Therefore, persist with careful patience and take caution of the frantic always-on obsession with 21st-century internet buzz.

How to ideate:

  1. Pick an idea.
  2. Put in some work. Experiment.
  3. Let your brain sit on your experience and connect the dots.

For some people, letting go of an idea is just a stepping stone to the next one. It’s rare for anyone to succeed in capturing their first and exact intent.

Categories
Creativity Productivity & Work

Back of the envelope…for starters ✍️✉️

gif by Neil Sanders

It doesn’t matter where or how an idea emerges. What matters is that the concept exists somewhere on paper, a napkin, an envelope, a Tweet, or a blog post.

We can’t begin to assess and dissect our thoughts unless we can see its basic framework and bones visually.

I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.

Field Notes

It is an inherent response to draw what’s already in the mind — it is another to attack the stimulus and make it come to fruition.

Jack Dorsey sketched Twitter out on a napkin. Hugh MacLeod started drawing cartoons on the back of business cards.

Jack Dorsey’s original sketch for “twttr”

There isn’t a perfect time, place, nor medium to write out our ideas. But it has to get recorded somewhere as a sketch, an iPhone note, or as a sticky as the first step toward execution.

The heart to start is easier said than done. The trick is to avoid the perils of thinking too logically in the beginning. All ideas exist in rough draft before we can test, tweak, market, and sell the idea to see it actually works.

The struggle for answers and subsequent failures is where all the learning takes place.

Categories
Productivity & Work

Ready, rock steady

gif via Reddit

The more you work the more you make, at least it appears that way. But Søren Kierkegaard thought wiser:

“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.”

Søren Kierkegaard

Henry Miller also disdained to overwork:

“I’ve found that it isn’t necessary to work that much. It’s bad, in fact. You drain the reservoir.”

Henry Miller

More work may beget more money but also creates more stress, which may negatively impact productivity. There’s nothing wrong with taking a break or a vacation and letting the mind run on its own.

Even during those dull moments your mind is working, jettisoning the bad ideas and retaining the good ones much like a washing machine. This process intensifies during sleep.

Pace your work. Focus and relax once in a while and allow the brain to sort out the connections. Slow and steady wins the race.

Categories
Culture Productivity & Work Tech

Does automation make us less human?

How much of our thought process do we want to relinquish to artificial intelligence?

Even Gmail’s auto-replies takes the burden out of typing in two-word responses with pre-populated text likes “yes, great,” “sounds good,” or “awesome.” Soon enough the computers will be the only ones conversing and high-fiving each other.

Just as the painter imitates the features of nature, algorithms emulate human memes. The problem is the tendency to abuse these recipes to avoid thinking altogether. Bathing in such idleness set the precedent for laggard times.

Without thought and action, our memories will starve. When we type, we produce pixels on a screen. Auto-reply forfeits the experience of being there. But such detachment may not be as harmful as we think. 

The symbiosis of man and machine begs for innovation. AI may free up cognition for other more intensive tasks. In other words, having a dependable personal assistant may compel us to do even more great work. 

The only fear of AI is complete human dependence. We need elements of crazy to keep creating. We’ll die off as soon as we stop winging it.

Categories
Culture People Psychology Tech

What does it mean to be me?

What does it mean to be me?

Sociologist Erving Goffman believed that all human interaction was a theatrical performance. In his most famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman called his analysis the study of  “Dramaturgy.”

Dramaturgical analysis is the idea that we present an edited version of our selves when we meet others in person.

All the internet’s a stage

The internet, of course, adds a new layer of complexity to Goffman’s perspective.

If social media is edited real life, then our dramaturgical action is the physical extension of it. We are no less authentic online than we are in person.

Goffman’s theory builds on American sociologist Charles Cooley’s ‘The Looking Glass Self’ theory. In 1902, he contextualized the individual:

“I imagine your mind, and especially what your mind thinks about my mind, and what your mind thinks about what my mind thinks about your mind.”

Charles Cooley

Keep in mind that people only considered themselves individuals with the rise of mirrors in the 15th century.

We juggle identities online and off, but each of us has a fixed character. It is our friends and family members and Google who know our most authentic self.

Categories
Creativity Productivity & Work Writing

Everything starts on paper 

Whether you are using post-it notes or loose leaf, paper is ideal for getting down thoughts and mapping out ideas quickly.

Everything starts on paper.

Whether you are using post-it notes or loose leaf, paper is ideal for getting down thoughts and mapping out ideas quickly. In fact, some Google employees prohibit phones and use paper exclusively to brainstorm. The magic of writing in analog is a controlled speed, flexibility, and focus.

“Everyone can write words, draw boxes, and express his or her ideas with the same clarity.”

If computers are a bicycle for the mind, as Steve Jobs once proclaimed, then writing on paper is like taking a walk. Paper jogs the mind, it is slow yet methodical, allowing it to connect the dots between disparate things.

“As with music, so with thought: when you want clarity, you seek out paper. Paper is the slow food of thought.”

As much as technology facilitates creativity, it can also distract it. Various studies show that taking notes by hand helps students remember more. Physical books, like vinyl, are also still hanging around despite the popularity of e-readers. Meanwhile, handwritten letters are considered more meaningful because of the perceived effort it went into writing and mailing them.

Digital abundance drives up the value of scarce objects like paper. Paper is proving its longevity not just as a nostalgic medium but also because it benefits the process of thinking and planning.

“As long as everyone is thinking and writing stuff on paper, you’re on the golden path.”

Read The Google Guys Use Paper

Categories
Business Creativity Life & Philosophy Productivity & Work

Thinking in fragments

Half-baked ideas are valuable ideas. Messy minds and messy processes generate new ways of thinking. #amwriting #gif

Half-baked ideas are valuable ideas. Messy minds and messy processes generate new ways of thinking. 

We create through the imperfect. “A small drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions think,” wrote businessman and self-help book author William Clement Stone.

The more ideas we have, the more we have to play with. Brainstorming is, therefore, a democratic process that begets everything from rules and rights to innovations like the iPod. Thinkers look for gaps in human needs and find ways to build opportunities around them. 

Concepting in any form — through discussion, rough drafts, or Twitter conversations add to the intensity of life’s possibilities. In producing and collecting fragments the puzzle pieces start to become whole.

gif by @annasalmi

Categories
Life & Philosophy

Textbook wisdom

Theories are productive ways of thinking even if they’re proven wrong. They lead to other research.

Theories are productive ways of thinking even if they’re proven wrong. They lead to other research.

Take the theory of evolution. The topic itself lends to all types of discussions around race, identity, brain and body development. Aren’t we all just pond scum who lucked out on terra firma?

This is not to say we should believe in half-truths. Textbook wisdom says that we know only what we know as of right now.

But there is still no substitute for thinking through new possibilities even if it’s separate from our own palette of experience.

art via giphy