Building new things is an expensive, arduous, and long path, so product builders are always hunting for means to validate new ideas. Chasing ghosts is costly and deadly.
The “data-driven” culture we now live in discourages making bets from the gut. “I have a hunch” isn’t good enough. We need to hold focus groups, do market research, and validate our bets before we make them. You need to come bearing data, learnings, and business cases before allowing your dev team to get started on new features.
New Metaphors is a project to help spur creative thinking through metaphor. It’s a deck of cards you can use in exercises to help stimulate new perspectives on an existing idea:
A metaphor is just a way of expressing one idea in terms of another. This project is a nightmare. The city is a playground. You are a gem. Creating new metaphors could help us design new kinds of product, service, or experience, and even help us think about and understand the world differently.
A lot of Steve Jobs content is hagiography at this point, but this clip is fantastic:
There’s an enormous delta between idea and execution. Someone can take a great idea and squander it. Or conversely, someone could take a middling and obvious idea and execute so well they build a billion dollar business. From the first part of the clip:
One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease, I’ve seen other people get it, too,...
About a year ago I started experimenting with the idea of a daily journal. From someone within the Roam community, I heard about the concept of Morning Pages, which is a tool for creative writers to build a muscle for generating ideas. Author Julia Cameron defined it in her book The Artist’s Way:
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages—they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about...
If a note is an idea, we want to make the idea as atomic as possible, so we can find and stitch them together into an interconnected web of ideas. We want composable building blocks.
Composability helps us stack, mix, and repurpose ideas. To correlate them and find the relationships between them. Prose is an excellent medium for consumption, for diving deep on a particular topic. But with a prose format for documenting ideas (through notes), it’s harder to relate shared ideas across domains. Prose makes ideas easy to expand on and consume, but difficult to decompose into reusable parts....
New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.
Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of...
David Perell’s been putting out a series of 100 posts, 1 per day, brief essays about writing. I enjoyed this one about the evolutionary, and recombinant, nature of ideas:
All creativity is inspired by other people’s ideas. The faster you embrace that, the more successful you can be as a creative. As Brain Pickings author Maria Popova once said: “Something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came...
Every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates.
There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you’re looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by looking for heresies. When you look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas.
I found out recently, I think through an EconTalk interview with economist Tyler Cowen, that Stripe has created their own publishing house for books. From their own about page:
Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.
I love this idea. It’s fantastic to see a company really putting skin in the game on advancing ideas...
