Seeking New Ideas That Seem Crazy But Are Right | 5Y View

Even the most learned people need a certain capacity to generate more creative new ideas. We often summarize this capacity as creativity, imagination, or originality.

This article is drawn from a long essay by Silicon Valley startup godfather Paul Graham titled How to Do Great Work. We've excerpted sections on "how to generate new ideas." Paul Graham proposes several methods: seek ideas that seem crazy but are correct; maintain rigor while daring to break rules; think in reverse; and ask more original questions.

Generating ideas requires staying sharp. When you notice a crack on the surface of knowledge and keep prying it open, you may discover an entire new world. We hope this article inspires you :)

Original: "How to do great work" by Paul Graham. Reprinted from: 36Kr, Translated by Shenyi Bureau.

How to Generate New Ideas

People often say that great ideas must be both correct and novel. Even if you're already learned and have reached the frontier of knowledge, having creative new ideas still requires a certain capacity.

We've given this capacity various names: originality, creativity, imagination. Someone might excel in other areas — many technical skills, for instance — yet still be unskilled at this.

I've never liked the term "creative process" because it seems misleading. Originality isn't a process; it's a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing sparks when it contacts anything.

If people are focusing on something they don't yet understand, the new ideas they generate may not be good ones. I'm not sure if originality can be cultivated, but there are certainly ways to make the most of what you have. For example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas; they come from doing or understanding something slightly difficult.

Talking or writing about things that interest you is a great way to generate new ideas. When you try to turn ideas into words, gaps create a vacuum that pulls more ideas from your mind. Indeed, some thinking can only be done through writing.

Changing your environment also helps. Going somewhere new often generates fresh thinking. Travel itself can spark innovative ideas, but it doesn't have to be far — sometimes a walk is enough.

Moving between domains with different themes also aids creativity. If you explore various topics, you'll generate more new ideas, because it provides more surface area for contact, and analogy is a rich source of new ideas.

However, don't distribute your attention evenly across many topics — that leads to diffusion. It's better to distribute attention according to something like a power law: maintain professional curiosity about some topics, and casual curiosity about many more.

Curiosity and creativity are closely related. Curiosity supplies new elements for creative development, and curiosity itself is a form of creativity. In fact, the originality of the question is the originality of the answer. Ideally, the question itself is an important part of the answer. Curiosity is also an expression of creativity.

Be Rigorous and Break Rules

When you see a new idea, you might think it looks obvious. So why didn't anyone think of it before?

An idea that seems both novel and obvious tends to be considered a good one.

Seeing obvious things sounds easy. Yet gaining new ideas through experience is difficult. Where does this apparent contradiction come from? Seeing new ideas usually requires changing how we see the world. We often see through existing models, which both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious.

But discovering and fixing broken models is hard. This is why new ideas are both obvious and hard to find: they're easy to see once you've worked hard on the problem.

One way to discover broken models is to be more rigorous than others. Bad models leave clues that contradict reality, but most people don't see them. So they ignore the clues, no matter how obvious they seem in retrospect.

To discover new ideas, you must seize on these bad signs rather than look away. Einstein did this — he saw the enormous implications of Maxwell's equations because he was more rigorous.

Also, be willing to break conventions. If you want to fix your model of the world, it helps to be the kind of person who enjoys breaking conventions. From the perspective of the old model that everyone agreed on, new models usually break some implicit rule. Few people understand how much convention-breaking is required, because once successful, new ideas seem conservative. It took humanity half a century to generally accept the heliocentric model, even among astronomers, because it initially felt wildly wrong.

In fact, a good new idea must seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for are ideas that seem crazy but are correct. Usually ideas that seem bad actually are bad; truly crazy ideas tend to be exciting — they carry far-reaching implications, while bad ideas tend to be depressing.

There are two ways to make breaking rules easier: enjoying it, or being indifferent to rules. Both are insightful. I call the first active and the second passive. For active types, rules don't just fail to stop them — breaking rules gives them extra energy. Bold projects excite them and provide ample energy to get started.

The other way to break rules is not caring about them, or not even knowing they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make discoveries — their ignorance of a field is the source of their insight.

Rigor and rule-breaking may seem like a strange combination. In popular culture they're opposites, but popular culture isn't always right. For trivial matters, rigor and rule-breaking may be opposed. But on truly important matters, only those who break rules can truly be rigorous.

Find New Ideas Through Reverse Thinking

A neglected idea often makes it to the semifinals. While part of your subconscious has already spotted it, another part rejects it because it's too strange, too risky, requires too much work, and might cause too much controversy. This actually suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off this kind of subconscious filtering, you could see more new ideas.

You can ask others what good ideas they have to explore, so your subconscious won't filter them out to protect you. You can also discover neglected ideas through reverse thinking: start with what's covering them up. Around every valued but wrong principle lies a territory full of valuable ideas that no one explores because they contradict the principle.

In a field, people often cling to certain things with religious fervor, holding certain principles too tightly, when the truth may be otherwise. What happens if you dare to ignore such principles?

Question Originality Matters More Than Answer Originality

People show far more creativity in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest people are surprisingly conservative in deciding what to work on. People who never dreamed of being trendsetters end up solving popular problems by accident.

Part of why people are more conservative in choosing problems than in solving them is that the stakes are higher. A problem might consume years of your life, while exploring a solution might take only days. Even so, I think most people are too conservative. They're responding to risk, but also to popularity — and unpopular problems are underestimated.

One of the most interesting types of unfashionable problems is those that people think have been fully explored but haven't. Great work often reveals the potential in something that already exists — Dürer and Watt did this. So if you're interested in a field that others think is exhausted, don't let their skepticism stop you.

Solving an unpopular problem can be deeply satisfying. No hype, no rush. Opportunists and critics are probably busy attacking elsewhere. By contrast, existing work often has an old-fashioned reliability. And cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted brings a satisfying feeling.

But the most common neglected problems aren't outdated ones — they're problems that don't seem important. How do you find those? You have to be willful; let your curiosity run free, at least temporarily ignoring that opposing voice in your head that says to only study important problems.

Try asking yourself: if you were to step away from serious work and do something purely because it's interesting, what would it be? The answer may be more important than it seems.

The originality of choosing the problem matters more than the originality of solving it — this is what distinguishes those who discover entirely new domains. So although deciding what to work on seems like merely the first step, in a sense it's the crux of the whole game.

True Insight Often Lies in the Question

Few people understand this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think great ideas are answers, but true insight often lies in the question.

We underestimate questions partly because of how schools use them. In school, problems exist only briefly, like unstable particles, before being answered. But a truly good question can be much more. A truly good question is an incomplete discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same one that keeps planets in orbit? Simply by asking such questions, you've already entered exciting new territory.

Being troubled by unanswerable questions all day might make you uncomfortable. But the more unsolved mysteries you have, the greater your chance of finding a solution — or more excitingly, noticing that two unsolved problems are connected.

Sometimes a problem haunts you for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to something you first noticed years ago, or even as a child, that you couldn't stop thinking about. People often talk about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams, but it's equally important not to forget the questions you asked when young.

This is one of the biggest differences between how professionals and the public view questions. In the public's eyes, experts have no doubts. But in reality, the more confused you are, the better. People with sufficient expertise are often puzzled by certain things. To some extent, confusion is part of creativity. You have to be comfortable enough with this confusing world to be willing to see problems, yet not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.

Having many unanswered questions is wonderful. You might find yourself with more and more questions, because the best way to get new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don't just lead to answers; they lead to more questions.

5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires lone entrepreneurs, providing everything from spiritual to operational support. We believe that if the you whom others see as crazy begins to be believed in, the world will become a different place.

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