Good ideas come from lots of ideas

Waiting until you have a good idea and hoping it arrives soon is fruitless. Good ideas invariably come from having many ideas.

Linus Pauling, the only winner of two solo Nobel Prize awards in history, had this to say about finding ideas: “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” … The lives of well-known creative thinkers were filled with compulsions for playing with ideas: they wanted wide landscapes to explore. Beethoven obsessively documented every idea he had, madly scribbling them on tree trunks or on the manuscript paper he had jammed into his clothing, even interrupting meals and conversations to scratch them down.[1]

Ideation can be an intentional activity (e.g., Idea Quotas), but most often it is the serendipitous result of idleness and play.

… It’s the willingness to explore, experiment, and play, to invest energy, hit a dead end, and then chase a new direction that allows minds to find good ideas. All of our notions of play, and its freedoms from formal judgment, are inexplicably linked to finding good ideas.[2]

#innovation-creativity

See also:

  1. The Myths of Innovation – Berkun (2010), ch. 6, § “How to find good ideas.” ↩︎

  2. Ibid. ↩︎