Ask YC: Could you provide a specific account of how you personally come up with novel ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Could you provide a specific account of how you personally come up with novel ideas?

21 pointsamichail39 comments

So how do you do it? How do you put your brain in a state of mind that is conducive to creative thinking?

Even if you can't say much about it in general, maybe you could say something about the specific circumstances under which you came up with novel ideas?

I am especially interested to know if you can will yourself to be creative by devoting hours/days entirely for this purpose. And if so, what sort of stimuli are helpful in this regard.

Also, can you be creative alone or do you need to brainstorm with others?

View on HN

I'm one of those guys that get a novel idea every minute of the day. I hold a few patents as well. To me ideas are cheap, but that's probably because I find it easy to come up with them. Here's how I do it:

Whenever I see something that doesn't quite work I can't help thinking about why it doesn't work better and how to resolve the problem. This includes how to shorten the lines without using extra personnel in my local supermarket, how YC news recommendation system could be made to work better, and how to do 3D displays. Anything really...

The keys to getting the good ideas are:

1) have lots of them - my ideas are no better that anyone elses, I just have a lot. Statistically a good one will pop up every now and then.

2) When you encounter a problem think through all the possible ways of resolving it. Don't mind if some of them are outrageous, just be sure to discard them when you have checked that they don't work. A friend and mine and I once actually thought that according to the laws of physics a certain combination of magnets and superconductors should make a perpetual motion machine. We set up an experiment, and of course it didn't work. We tried it and discarded it, and we weren't afraid of trying something crazy.

3) Know about different disciplines, and have broad knowledge. Innovation often comes from crossbreeding different disciplines. If you put a physicist and a web designer in a room you will get more innovation than if you put two physicists in a room.

Just my two cents, hope it's useful.

Are you me? That's almost exactly what I would have written. I have a yellow notebook in which I write down ideas as they come to me. It contains everything from a way to dry the shower curtain to prevent mold, through a way to adjust car mirrors by eye tracking to various web site ideas.

Essentially, whenever I see something I end up wondering how to improve it, or why it hasn't been improved in the way I think would work.

"Perspective is worth 80 points of IQ" - Alan Kay

Almost everybody here is focussed on a single, simple consumer niche: rich white people who shop online.

Because, you say, that's where the money is. Well... no.

That's where 2% of the money is. Maybe 5%. Out there, in the big wide world, there are tens of thousands of other lifestyle niches, other places to see. Take a look at that Nokia guy's blog,

http://www.janchipchase.com/

Nokia pays him to wander around the world learning about people and how they use things including but not limited to cell phones.

The whole B2B boom, just before the .com bust was a moment of insight... "wow, people outside of the home shopping by internet niche can use the internet to buy things."

So. Ideas.

First thing, get the hell out of San Francisco. Stay away from TechCrunch. Go to Iowa or Brazil. Spend two weeks walking or bicycling around. Call it a vacation. If you take a computer, don't look at your usual sites, turn off your RSS feeds, don't take work email. Put yourself in a new state of mind and then, if money is the goal, ask yourself "what would these people like their computers to do?"

But the space of "software for technohip 20somethings" is heavily swamped right now. It's a saturated, clogged, grossly overfilled demographic.

You want a freebie? An integrated software/hardware/services combo for old people's homes. Does email to help residents talk to their families, prints out pictures when they are sent automatically so people can take them back to their rooms, reminds people of calendar obligations like their grandchildren's birthdays. Maybe even supports some kind of mediated e-commerce which has a credit card account which can only be spent at a known-good list of a couple of hundred stores, so that they can't get phished.

Yes, it would take some selling, but the improvement in quality of life for the residents, and for their families is not insignificant, and business is booming for old people's homes.

Get out of your demographic. That's where the money is.

I have had people come to me with seemingly complex problems requiring what they thought would be complex solutions. Oddly, the elegant solution was often a gross simplification of the complex problem. Often because I just didn't understand the complexity.

Example 1. A shipper can only fit 1200 boxes in a 40 foot trailer. The material is so light, they can never make weight. The boxes must be delivered to depots throughout the United States with no more than a 3 day window either way. What box should go on which truck? The customer thought they needed sophisticated algorithms to provide an optimal solution. The simple solution: a screen where an educated user can drag boxes (or groups of boxes) to trailers and can drag trailers to destinations. The computer did very little, but the difficult business problem turned into a "game" that employees fought each other to "play".

Example 2: A cloth manufacturer wanted a linear algebra solution to determine what products to mount on their mills and where to set the knives. The simple solution: A screen with all customer orders and key data about each order (size, weight, width). Everything on the screen was sortable and switchable. Again, an intelligent user could "play a game" to schedule the mills almost as well as any automated algorithm.

Example 3: A distributor wanted to know what to buy, when to buy it, and what to put on sale to move slow inventory. He wanted an expensive ERP program. The simple solution: A screen with all supplies and demands that can be mixed, matched, sorted, and selected in many different ways. Again, an intelligent user can "play" with his data and then confidently make decisions.

The "real" bonus of all these "simple" solutions? The person drove the decision and felt in control of the situation. No more blaming the computer for the results.

My suggestion: Slow down. Even stop. Ask, "How are we making this too complicated? What simple little thing could I do to get just part of the way there?" You may surprise yourself and find that the simple little idea IS the solution.

Heh, that's neat. I've seen a couple people here recommend using the world's massive computer gaming habit to do data analysis. Cool to see that might actually be fun, and if someone created a good startup based on this idea, I'd definitely participate!

Excellent examples.

One lesson I would draw from this: Stop pretending that computers can think -- which they can't -- and start thinking of ways that a computer can help a human do everything but the thinking. Think cyborg, not robot.

I'd say it's very hard to make a good product if it doesn't solve a problem you are personally facing.

For example, we wanted to do a usability test, but it's quite a hassle to find enough people to do it. I thought how more and more laptops had integrated cameras. So I came up with the idea of a service that lets me pay $5 to random people on the Internet in exchange of recording their screens + their faces and voice while they use our site. It shouldn't be too hard to use the camera to do eyetracking, either.

If I wasn't building a public-facing website and had not done in-person usability tests, I wouldn't have thought of this.

We had an idea like this too. Almost applied to yc with it.

I think it's all about understanding a) what creates human pain, b) how much pain it creates, and c) how difficult it is to ease that pain.

A lot of people have problems understanding what humans would actually find useful. If they've identified the pain-point, they don't spend enough time investigating how deep the pain goes. The last point is a reflection of either being a hacker or being comfortable with understanding how technology gets built -- if you don't know how to solve the pain or how difficult solving the pain is, you're in big trouble.

I think very few people have the ability to do all three consistently.

Generally, I don't think it's something you're born with, but if you are an 'ideas' person, you can refine your personal heuristics to identify good ideas better over time.

I agree with Parker on the pain point and I agree with mixmax on the constant flow of ideas. Keep track of them. Keep lists. Revisit the lists. Prune the lists. I usually hit instantdomainsearch.com to see if anyone's registered an obvious name for the concept, reg it if it hasn't been, explore the competition if it has.

Two thoughts:

1) Go to Amazon. It's obviously a huge center of commerce. Find an active forum. Make it easier for someone (or a group) to do something they're talking about doing there, complaining about, etc. Advertise it there in the forums. That's how I launched RefreshThing.

2) Observe existing behavior in others you can relate to. Improve upon it, make it simpler, show them how it should be done online. Double points if that behavior is something they're accustomed to doing offline and are crawling online where you can show them how to run.

Or try picking an idea you have right now, developing it (a little or a lot) and then solving the problem you don't know it has until you're at a stage where you can see that about it.

I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelin was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink, and when I came to I had a relvalation, a vision, a picture in my head.

Seriously though... I think best in the bath or while asleep or while driving.

+1 for inventing the flux capacitor

I dont' think that ideas are manufactured. They sort of "pop out" when the right kinds of pressure are applied from the right directions. You seem to be searching for some sort of methodology for generating good ideas. I personally think procedure is detrimental to creativity. Procedure begets sameness. What you need to have new ideas are novel sensations.

And stop trying so hard. Clear your head. Take a different route home. Go sit on a park bench for a couple of hours and try not to think about computers. Go out with a new circle of people and take an interest in them. Tune to a radio or TV station that you would normally skip over.

When you get the seed of a new idea, it will usually be something nebulous. Don't write down. Hold it in your head and let it churn around for a while until you have something more concrete. Then talk to other people about it.

For me, it's simply something that's learned and cultivated. As far as I can tell, my creativity comes from a sense of curiosity in the world around me, a mental flexibility to entertain odd possibilities, and a broad scope of knowledge.

This sort of question is asked of cartoonists a lot, and usually, they'll make up some sort of fanciful answer, like "I like to drink coffee with cocoa butter". In reality the very best ones have cultivated a sense of curiosity about edge case situations. They make it a habit to notice odd things, and things that don't quite make sense when you think about it. If you read Bill Watterson's (Calvin and Hobbes) Tenth Anniversary Edition, he talks about this topic, and his answer is that he mainly just sit there and lets his mind wander in front of a blank piece of paper--which to others might look remarkably like goofing off. Hackers in general are the same way, but they get curious about systems and how things work instead.

A mental flexibility to entertain possibility helps as well. Often times we're boxed in by our experience, and what we know, as hard as we try to break out of it. When radio was invented, it was asked why you'd want to say stuff to no one in particular. And when the TV came out, the inventor of the radio dismissed it. Here, I think it helps to know how to daydream and let your mind wander. Or when you approach a problem outside your field think of how to solve it using something outside of your expertise. The only person I've ever read about to overcome it was Richard Feynman. Apparently, he had the ability to start from basics from any problem and work his way from the bottom up, aware of his assumptions.

Lastly, what's called creative is often just taking two old things that don't usually go together, and getting them to play well with each other. When you know about lots of things and have a broad scope, you start to see how things are interconnected. In school, I liked math, but other kids complained about how they'll never use it. It wasn't until after college that I started to see that the segmentations of subjects is done so that students don't get confused and have discrete chucks of info to learn. In reality, every academic subject is interconnected somehow, and when you have the broadness of scope with deepness in some of them, you'll be able to make connections between things that are related, but not usually thought of as being so. If you can make those connections, people will usually dub you as being creative, when you don't think it's as big of a deal yourself.

Being creative is a habit you get into.

Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity."

More on Glander by Taleb: "It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best—but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called “Glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part —so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."

Newton was a “glandeur”; In Dijksterhuis 2004:

George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”

I Glander whenever I am bored and I come up with formulate groundbreaking ideas. Some of them are even viable for monetization!

Here are 3 ways I've identified highly profitable ideas:

a) Having a problem that needs solving. It's OK if it's a focused need, so long as you're not addressing a market which is too small. The world of people who research online is big enough. The world of Web 2.0 developers is not.

b) Careful listening to user feedback. Often users of one of my products have given me an inkling of the need for another. This will happen if (1) the original product works well, (2) the new product appeals to a similar audience, (3) you make it easy for people to give you feedback, and read it religiously and with empathy.

c) Being in-the-know about breaking trends. Make sure you regularly read (or at least skim) some high quality international publications. I read The Economist cover-to-cover every week, along with BusinessWeek. Worth every minute.

For me, each of these methods has been the catalyst for creating at least one successful online business.

The best ideas come to me when I am stoned. I have a set of huge white boards, I smoke a little then doodle. 95% is not worth much the next day, but some of the ways my mind drifts and connects is awesome.

alternatively, there are a few other healthier ways to get into a high alpha state. I find that a shower, or driving around is good. Also a nap. Sleep deprivation leads me to full imagine some of my best graphic designs. They just pop into my head fully formed as I lay in bed half crazy cause I haven't slept. :-)

Also, and this is absolutely important, keep a small notepad and pen(cil) nearby, and write down your ideas the instant they come. You'd be surprised how many great ideas we have and forget. Remember to note the date, and how you came up with the idea. If you're without writing tools, set a reminder in your phone to a time when you know you'll be home, but it is imperative you record it.

Don't be afraid if ideas come out of sequence. I'm getting into freelance graphic design, and one evening I just started writing the word 'concept' in all sorts of ways, using 'k' instead of 'c', and then drew a capital 'T' with the letters 'concep' under it. Then I thought: let's try another letter. So I drew a capital 'S', but with a straight vertical line and 2 horizontal lines instead of curves, and had 'con' down the left side and 'ept' down the right. It looked good, but I wanted to explore some more. So I tried the letter 'C', and wrote 'oncept' inside it following the shape of the 'C'. That was the first breakthrough: it looked like half of a clock. So I draw a full clock, and what do you know, the letters in 'concept correspond perfectly to the number positions on a clock face! So 12 o'clock is a 'C', 11 and 1 o'clock are 'O' etc. So I found myself with a clock with the word 'concept' on it twice... two concepts. A little more brainstorming gave me the final name "Twin-Concept." This is what I meant by ideas out of sequence: normally, you'd come up with the company name and then design the logo, but I was determined to use that logo, and so I named the company after the logo! The hour marks are set in green, to give it that 'glow in the dark look.' Against a black background, it's sexy.

Oh, and did I mention that you should write down ideas as soon as they come?

The extremely embarrassing truth is that I've gotten many of my AI ideas while trying to write science fiction and fantasy stories.

- Eliezer Yudkowsky

The best way I have found is this: Think about the most normal, expected solution to a problem would be, and then try to imagine the opposite. This is really good for getting juices flowing and starting things up. in reality you usually use 80% of the "normal" solution and make a couple nuances that are opposite of what people might normally think of.

Consider practicing a discipline where you write down one new idea every day. Most of these ideas will suck, but tracking them over time might show you (1) some deeper ideas and (2) that even if 95% of your ideas suck, that 5% is still enough to work with.

I'd worry about "devoting" hours/days to idea generation. You can make more progress by drafting, shipping, and refining an idea than by sitting alone generating a lot of ideas without implementation. Take your best idea and figure out the fastest way to make it into something people can use. Pay attention and you'll learn a ton.

This book has some ideas about a framework for looking at existing things in a new light in the hopes of generating new ideas:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/5/lateral-marketing-n...

It's not a bad technique if you're actively trying to generate ideas.

Useful novelty, that I would act on?

I've been immersed in my specialty for 15 years.

As it happens, this number of years is pretty much the norm for the highly creative (10 years is the lower bound). For details, see:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-Pe...

You might find this book useful: "A Technique for Producing Ideas", by James Young. Exceedingly short, simple, meant for advertising, but helpful for any industry.

http://www.amazon.com/Technique-Producing-Advertising-Classi...

Most of the comments here are about very linear thought processes like: problem->simplification->solution.

Those are great, and valuable but I think the most fun ideas are the ones that come from having a head full of random shit floating around and colliding. The ones that stick together well are the winners. :D

If you don't have any (or many) ideas, you need to lower your threshold for what you consider a good idea.

And when you see something that annoys you, think about how to solve it.

Talk about your ideas with friends. Get feedback. Tweak. Rinse and repeat.

For me ideas come through conversations, reading tech news and working on one idea that turns into another. Also, as a songwriter where songs just pop into my head, ideas do to. Odd as that may sound.

Do you feel that you can just "think different" and new thoughts come to you?

Before I started my first startup, I used to see all sorts of problems and never really think that they could be applied to something. But after I started something based on what a friend of mine came up with, I've been able to see so many problems that I've had before, and come up with ideas on how to solve them. The only difference was that I had gone through the process to understand a fundamental problem that existed and focused on how to solve that problem.

What I'm trying to say here is that the difference in thought is really thinking if anything that you are doing could be done differently or better.

I would argue that my thought processes pre-startup and post-startup are very different, and also that I've been able to have new ideas because of it.

Yeah, I've noticed something similar in myself. Once I've actually seen a difficult problem through on my own initiative, I can see my crazy ideas are actually insightful. I just need to develop that confidence, which is hard.

I find it important to just take some time off for yourself every once in a while and let your mind wander.

Based on what your experiences, what you've read, and what you've done something should pop into your head!

Edgecraft.

Seth Godin describes the process in Free Prize Inside.

(http://decentmarketing.typepad.com/weblog/2004/05/on_the_edg...)

My ideas tend to form like trees: I have loads of ideas (seeds) that I will plant in my head. Over time, and through research and reading (what's happening around me and on the web; what are the latest technologies; where are things heading; how can I help solve these problems; etc.), one of the seeds will start to develop into a tree. At this point I look up to the top of the tree and try to see how my idea will change the world once its has fully grown. Once I have an idea about that, I then work backwards to try and figure out what parts (branches) are needed to reach the end goal. Some of the branches will also need some development before they are fully formed branches. Sometimes the branches develop so much that they actually create there own seeds, which fall off and grow into new trees; the new trees are related to the original one, but by developing them into their own fully formed idea, allows them to have a wider/greater impact than they would if they were still attached to the original. This process reiterates itself and some of the ideas refine themselves. This is where it can start to get messy, so good organisation is required, e.g. mind-maps and the like.

Most of my ideas develop inside my head when I am not in front of the computer and when I am not really concentrating on anything, which is usually when I am in the shower. I let them ponder in my mind, perhaps sleep on them, and then, all of sudden, I will have the urge to frantically mind-map them out and research them.

With regards to brainstorming, I usually do this after I have envisaged the top of the tree. I usually go to my colleagues and/or advisor's and bounce the ideas off them. We usually then "discuss" how crazy the idea is, what would make it feasible, what attitudes and habits would need to change in order to make them work, etc., which helps me identify what the branches need to look like on the way up to the top of the tree.

So as an example, one of the things I am working on is a way to speed up research - that was the first seed, which was born out of my own frustrations with the status quo. If I speed up research, how will it impact the rest of the world and how will the world work if I pull it off? - which is the top of the tree. Imagining how the world would work if my idea reached fruition, allows me to identify all of the other things that are also required for it to work (the branches). For example, I think a new document format is required to speed up research, and so I have started to develop this as a new branch, which itself is almost at the point of forming a seed, falling off and becoming a tree in its own right.

I have no idea if any of that jibba-jabba made any sense, but it's how I work.

Pure luck:

http://brl.codesimply.net/brl_7.html#SEC74

something, write, take photos, notice other people, their work, their world, ...). Have a broad understanding about different areas of knowledge. Think about these different areas and how they could be combined together.

I pray to pagan gods.

I have this wall chart of all sorts of religions, and I move a game piece around it like a boardgame. Then whoever I'm on that day, I pray, like, "O great Yegbabo, deliver unto me a vision of a start-up idea." Then I imbibe the appropriate ceremonial substance, such as hashish, peyote, coca leaves, licking a toad, LSD -- it depends on the culture.

Anyway that's how McCarthy "invented" Lisp (he was at Esalen on vacation with Timothy Leary).

It helps me to understand the principles something is derived from. Then, I know the path and I can deviate from it.

Also, my biggest hangup is not a lack of creativity but the courage to see my creative ideas through, despite others not getting it. I know there are people like mixmax who can just throw together a bar in Ibiza and be wildly successful, but I don't know why I can't do stuff like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com