How do you invent the future?
According to the book “Where good ideas come from,” innovation happens by combining things we can see and touch today in novel ways.
Steve Jobs phrased it eerily similarly:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
I believe this because it matches my personal experience to the t. Everything I have ever “invented” (two startups, half a dozen products, hundreds of open source libraries) has come from connecting existing ideas and knowledge in new ways, all of them felt obvious while I was doing it.
The “adjacent possible”
“Where good ideas come from” calls the collection of everything we could (in theory) invent right now based on everything we know the adjacent possible. To illustrate metaphorically:
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Imagine the current state of the world as a room with four walls, each one with a locked door. If we find the right combination we can unlock a door to an adjacent room.
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That adjacent room again has four doors, three of them locked. If we find another combination, we can make it to the next adjacent room.
The adjacent possible is all the “rooms” we can theoretically reach by “opening one door.”
Notably, at any given moment, experts in their field are many rooms further down their path than you are (related: the illustrated guide to a PhD), so they have access to many locked doors that you don’t. They have more specialized things they can connect available to them.
How can you have more things to connect?
The next obvious question is how can you expand your adjacent possible; how can you have more things to connect?
“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” — Where good ideas come from
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Brainstorming? How to make brainstorming work
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Ship faster so you maximize shots on goal: How to ship faster
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Default to open
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Be genuinely interested
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Be unreasonably responsive so you collect more things
Other notes about Learning and/or Personal Growth
- 🌿How to be better at making decisions
What can I do before, during, and after making decisions to be better at making them?
- 🌿How I tend to my digital garden
My quests with this digital garden are to publish more and to have fun. Let's explore why I even have a digital garden and how it's going.
- 🌿How to have great taste
Taste is what differentiates the good from the great. So, how can I have better taste? This is my ongoing log of what I have learned.
- 🌱How to ship faster
Humans have the ability to get ambitious things done ridiculously fast. How can I get more things done quickly?
- đź”—Deliberate practice beats every other form of training, even via transfer learning
Many people are doing deliberate practice wrong in one specific way though. The Brazilians are an example of what happens when you get it right.
- đź”—David Cain: Do Quests, Not Goals
I love this reframing from "goal" to "quest": "goals" feel like pressure, "quests" feel like excitement and adventure!
- 🌿How we make brainstorming work
Brainstorming usually fails. But, I noticed a pattern in the times that it worked exceptionally well. Here's how to make it work.
- 🌲Why I'm vigorous about giving feedback
Every day, you will find me hunting down a founder's email to send them feedback about my experience with their product. Why?
- 🌿Why I don't compliment people for their talent
When people see somebody they perceive to be really good at something, they often say, “Wow, they are so talented!” I think that’s a bullshit compliment.