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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What are those favorite books or those favorite articles or those favorite passages that resonated with you so much and and took you down a path of thinking that maybe ended up being really important in your work, in your life. 00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use this software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Mark and I’m here today with my colleague Adam. How’s it going, Adam? 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: It’s going pretty good, Mark. Thanks. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And today’s topic is having better ideas. And this is a pretty broad topic. So I’d like to start with what is that? What what what does that mean to you? 00:00:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the word idea somehow I think is connected with um Maybe sort of a trivial thing, the um the walking down the street, something pops into your head, the shower thought, that sort of thing, you know, if you type idea into Google Image search, you get a bunch of stock photos of people looking thoughtful with some representation of a light bulb over their head. Um, I usually like to use the word ideation when I’m talking about muse specifically, but also more broadly about this, this topic, and I think that having Sort of the process by which you not just have the seed of an idea, which is really more that something popping into your head when you walk down the street, but how you develop the idea, how you take it from just a a a a hunch, let’s say, and turned it into something worthwhile, is actually really important for anyone that does creative or knowledge work. 00:01:46 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a sort of process or framework for developing ideas over the long term? 00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a big topic hard to even know fully where to start, but I think one of the things for me that’s key is treating ideation as a first class activity, is something important to do, something important to invest time in. Basically thinking about an idea takes a lot of time. Uh, and that the process of turning those well formed ideas into some kind of output is really just the, the like the second half of that. So, to make it more concrete, if you’re um a graphic designer, you probably make uh the output in a tool like Illustrator, Photoshop, uh, or maybe even like, you know, if you’re a physical artist, you’re painting a painting with, uh, with paint and brushes. Similarly, you’re an author, you might be using Scrivenner, Google Docs, and so on. But the moment of sitting down in front of the blank canvas, so to speak, to start, uh, creating the work is really only happens way deep in the process. And so that first half is what we call ideation. I feel like, um, maybe movies give us the wrong idea, specifically around authors because you have this, this image of someone sitting down in front of often a typewriter, if it’s an older movie, maybe more currently you have sitting down in front of a word processor, there’s the blank screen and the blinking cursor, and That’s not the start of the process. The start of the process is the ideation. 00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And for me it’s not just the kind of wall clock time you’re spending on ideation. For me, it also takes a lot of, you know, calendar time. It often takes several days or weeks or even months to fully develop an idea, and you can’t force it just by like sitting down and thinking about it harder. You need the the time, the changes of scenery, the different inputs for that idea to fully develop. Is that is that the same for you? 00:03:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would go with, um, I would of those on one hand. Just expecting it to happen purely as a background process in your head. Um, my long time colleague Ryan Henry likes to uses the word stewing usually. He kind of like likens it to a cooking one of these like, um, slow cooker processes where you, you leave it to stew over maybe many days, and that’s where the flavor really comes out. But on the same time, I don’t think it’s just something that happens naturally, automatically. I think you do need to work at it, you do need to invest in it and choosing for me at least, choosing to say there’s this important problem that I need to think through. I’m going to carve out time and space in my life and my calendar and. My emotional bandwidth to sit down and think hard to concentrate specifically on this problem is also necessary. You get that just doesn’t force a conclusion. I think both, both parts, the focused upfront, uh, sort of the focused concentrated effort and the background stewing, I think are both necessary to the process. 00:04:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d agree and to elaborate on that a little bit, I think of that first phase is a sort of feeding of the mind, you’re taking in. Uh, raw materials of sorts, you know, different ideas, different inputs, um, different possibilities, and often you’re sort of like chewing on them, you’re like, you know, turning them around in your mind, you’re holding that different combinations in your head at one time, and that’s kind of all raw material that goes to your, your sleeping mind. Uh, this, this background process is constantly working creatively to come up with new ideas and like you said, you need both of those fodder sometimes is a term I like to I like to use there. 00:05:16 - Speaker 1: It’s just like feeding in raw material that may or may not be relevant, may or may not be helpful, uh, but is all part of the, the, um, kindling that gets the fire going. 00:05:32 - Speaker 2: I, I have some pretty uh unique experiences with this time aspect because when I was an undergrad I did math and uh you often had these problem sets, which is a fancy word for homework, but it’s like very hard homework. It often takes a couple of weeks to do, for example. And you get these problem sets and uh they were so hard that you couldn’t actually do them in one sitting that regardless of how long that sitting was, you had to actually give it uh several days to like to ruminate on it, you know, you, you take it in, you chew on the problems, you’re ingesting this fodder and then over the course of 7 days and several nights, you might eventually come up with the answer. So there was this weird dynamic where if you didn’t start, you know, like problems that do on Friday, for example, if you didn’t start it by like Tuesday, you’re already hosed, um, and that’s a, that’s an experience that I, I think about a lot in my creative work now where you really need to give these things time. 00:06:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, one, kind of Hollywood representation of the The stewing process or the background process is, uh, this show House MD, which is about a basically a brilliant jerk of a doctor, and every show is kind of a, it has a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes vibe, but basically he’s trying to solve some tough problem, which is diagnosing some difficult medical case, and they’re always showing him basically seeming to be screwing around somehow. Um, he’s off in some weird corner of the hospital, messing with a vending machine or playing a video game or unrelated to the process of solving the problem, then you sort of, there’s the light bulb moment of someone says something that triggers an idea in his head, and then the pieces all kind of come together and then he’s rushing back to to say like I’ve got it. I’ve got the solution. And obviously this is the Hollywood version of things. It’s not quite how real life works, but I, I like how they consistently show this need to leave the focus space and go to a new environment or or let your unconscious mind or your background thread work on the problem. 00:07:30 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a particular way that you like to do that? Is it sitting on the hammock? Is it going for a walk? How do you approach that? 00:07:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I get a lot of mileage out of the dog walks for sure. And notably, one of my reasons or something that fed into my decision to adopt a dog was I was already going for super long walks anyways, uh, and very often timing wise is that I sit down to do the focused session. And, you know, we, we can talk about the tools more later, but let’s just say for the sake of argument, I’m in my office and I’m with a, with a sketchbook and I’m I’m working through a problem or thinking about a thing. And then at some point, I feel, you know, I’m a couple of hours into it. I feel mentally tired and and. Um, need a break and feel like I’m not making more progress and then that would be the moment I would go and just take a walk, say, in the park near my house, sometimes a pretty long walk, and something about the moving, the physical activity, the fresh air, the different kind of environments, settings, you know, trees are nice, all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a park, but I think just a different environment that I’m out and I’m exposed to new stimulus, and my, my mind is taken from that focus place. But the fact that I was just focusing on it so deeply means that that fodder is there and now it’s cooking in the slow cooker in the back of my mind. 00:08:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve been amazed at how effective it is to just change my physical scenery. Um, often when I change locations, I start to have different ideas and ways of thinking and uh for a long time I thought that was kind of coincidence, uh, but then I, I learned that it was actually this um cause and effect, so I can actually have better ideas or at least different ideas just by physically going somewhere else. You can like book a plane ticket to better ideas, it’s pretty wild. 00:09:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, I think environment is really powerful and that comes in a lot of different forms. There’s the type of stimulus you’re getting, um, and maybe only tangentially related, but the word environment makes me think of, I was just in thinking about the topic here for today, um, I naturally went to reference the book by Steven Johnson called Where Good Ideas Come From. And this book is really more about kind of society level ideas, um, where did, you know, enlightenment thinking and Royal Society and and sort of innovations, uh, rather than individual having an idea. But there’s certainly lots of parallels there, and he, he talks a lot about environments, particularly urban spaces, cities that a particular city in a particular time will be sort of a pressure cooker for a particular set of ideas. Uh, he talks about the web is also having some of the same chaotic, uh, quality, uh, and, and he makes comparisons in the natural world to coral reefs as being places that are rich, diverse, sometimes kind of chaotic, sometimes kind of messy, uh, but that’s where the place where you see a lot of, say, biological innovation. And I think that also works on an individual level or just mapping my own experience, it works on an individual level because ideas don’t come from nowhere. It’s not this blank slate sitting in an ivory tower pondering the universe and then suddenly the eureka moment, or at least that’s not it for me. Ideas come from other inputs, other ideas coming back to that. Fodder thing, but also the shape of the environment, not only gives you ideas or exposes you to ideas, but also just puts your brain in different gears or activates the neurons in a different way, or I’m not exactly sure what. And for me, nature can be creatively stimulating, but so can an urban environment, a really interesting bustling urban environment. 00:11:07 - Speaker 2: Yep, and we’ve talked here about um the the second phase of you have your raw materials and you Use those to come up with an idea, but you alluded to a really important concept which is, um, ideas are just combinations of other ideas, which I think is is really powerful. So I’m curious, how do you build up your, your library of ideas to combine as you’re thinking. 00:11:28 - Speaker 1: Reading a lot is a big one, but you can also ingest information in lots of different forms. Podcasts are quite good that way often. Uh, YouTube is a surprising trove of video essays and and things like that. I think it’s a little tricky with the information ingestion. We live in this world now where we just have these huge fire hoses of information available to us all the time. News news sources, whether it’s industry news or current events, every book that’s ever been written, every, you know, TV show and movie more or less is available on streaming, the podcasts, torrent of podcasts that are available. And there is a version of this that can be maybe almost a little mindless or a little more, maybe just more entertainment oriented, which is, which is fine, uh, but I try to make it so that at least a lot of the time that I spend, let’s say, consuming media is things that I feel like will feed into the ideas that I might have in the future. Uh, and so reading uh long form books is certainly one of the, one of the biggest items there. Now I know you’re a heavy reader and and certainly a heavy reader of PDFs. What’s your, uh, what’s your flow on that stuff look like these days? 00:12:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think if I’m on my game, I’m, I’m definitely actively reading. It’s, it’s much easier just to casually read and just kind of read through stuff, but I think it’s very easy for that to go in one ear and out the other, so to speak. Um, so I like to highlight, but I also like to do things like ask questions, summarize, challenge the arguments, um, pretend I was explaining this concept to someone else. Um, those are, are take much more effort. They’re, they’re a lot harder, um, but I, I find that when I do those, I have a much better grasp of the material and it’s, uh, it’s, it’s more ready to be processed in that background mind later. Well, should we venture into the world of tools here? 00:13:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, all the classics are good and good for a very good reason. So that’s a pen and a sketchbook, whether it’s, you know, a fancy moleskin field notes thing or just whatever GP thing you. Uh, by in your average stationary store. Post-it notes are always a really nice one, whether they’re on a whiteboard, on a wall. Um, I used to keep, um, big pieces of butcher paper, uh, in my, uh, office, and I would kind of pin those up on the, on the, on the board and, uh, put the Post-its there, you know, big fat markers, that kind of thing. And, um, pin board, obviously can be, can be good there. And then, uh, I think the whiteboard is a really great one for more of the group ideation. 00:13:56 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can also tell the story of the commonplace book. 00:13:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, commonplace book I think was common somewhat historically with um intellectual type people, which was basically a collection of notes about things you’d read and seen. And so, um, that would include things like an excerpt from an article or a book, uh, could, could also include a uh little sketch that you did, a scribble, um, something like that, and, uh, sort of represented not just your personal notes and writings, although there may be some of that, but also this collection of input or fodder that maybe was personal to you. Like you read a lot of things, but what are the things that really, what are those favorite books or those favorite articles or those favorite passages that resonated with you so much and and took you down a path of thinking that maybe ended up being really important in your work, in your life. And so a commonplace book is maybe a collection of these over time. 00:14:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of the things that I like about commonplace books is they are mixed media. So, at least for the media of that time, which is things like, you kn…
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