Results tagged “ideas”

Over at Wired Science, Jonah Lehrer looks into how we identify good ideas:

I've always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did the same songwriter who produced Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde also conclude that Down in the Groove was worthy of release? Or what about Steve Jobs: what did he possibly see in the hockey puck mouse? How could Bono not realize that Spiderman was a disaster? And why have so many of my favorite novelists produced so many middling works?

A big part seems to lie in letting your ideas marinate in your head for a while to give you some distance and perspective.

Why Leaders and Innovators Need Solitude to Do Good Work

Forty years of research on brainstorming shows that individuals produce more and better ideas than groups do. Studies also suggest that the path to excellence in many fields is not only to practice, but to practice alone. And creativity researchers have found that many highly creative people were shy and solitary in high school, and recall their adolescence with horror. (I explain all this in detail in my forthcoming book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.)

This is one of many reasons that introverts -- who are more likely than others to carve out solitary time -- are often very creative, and make unexpectedly fine leaders.

While a different idea, this brings to mind having one decision maker on on a project versus design-by-committee. As anyone who's been on a project (design or otherwise) knows, when there isn't a go-to person and everyone's voice has to be heard and incorporated into the product, that product inevitably ends up a watered-down mess. Barely competent at many things, great at nothing.

Seth Godin: The realization is now:

I regularly hear from people who say, "enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored..." There's an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It's not an idea, though, it's a myth.

This article by Matt Mullenwag is a must-read for anyone who creates anything. I'm talking about painters, designers, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians - any creator.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you've created until it's out there. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It's even worse because development doesn't happen in a vacuum -- if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven't even imagined that disrupts the market you're working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies -- including Ev Williams' Odeo -- before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

I've taken this mentality with Daily Exhaust. The site, as it is right now, is not what I would consider finished. The overall design is still in progress. I'm not even sure I would call it a 1.0 release candidate. I still have a lot of work to do, but having it up and live puts pressure on me to work on it, improve it.

It's a cliché, but seriously, if you have an idea, just do it.