Ask YC: When did you start having interesting ideas?

You can have an interesting idea any time. Problem is you may not even realize that you just had an interesting idea when you had it.

The journal is an excellent idea. I write everything down. When I look it over later, I'm usually embarrassed that I could have thought of anything so lame. But every once in a while, there are a few gems in there.

I always have pencil and a small notebook next to the bed. The best time for me to get good ideas is as soon as I wake up. The second best time is right before I go to sleep. I carry index cards and a pen at all times during the day, just in case.

The other important ingredient in good ideas is to get out there and experience things. All the time. You never know which inputs will spawn ideas, so get lots of inputs.

My best ideas have usually come when I see how something is and think, "There must be a better way." Then I let it lie dormant inside and trust my "inner self" to come up with something when I least expect it.

(My best hacking ideas ever came from the first time I saw a code generator. Simultaneously I thought, "That is so cool!" and "It can be so much better than that.")

So very true. I think experience gives you the knowledge to recognise when something can be done better because without it you just think that this is the norm and how things are. Throw in a dash of frustration just before "there must be a better way" and you have yourself an idea with determination behind it which is going to solve that problem.

I always have a bunch of paper in my back pocket for writing stuff down on the spur of the moment and then I develop the idea as a mind-map, sleep on it, and then develop it some more.

Reminds me of something a friend told me today...

The singer for the band, The National, apparently forces himself to write down a new idea (for lyrics) every 45 minutes. He says he only uses about 5% of what he comes up with. Coming up with a lot of crap is a recurring trend for many successful creative types, but you only hear about the 5% that isn't crap.

I was about six years old when I remember thinking to myself: I have a lot of great ideas. All I need is an 8 or 10-year old to help me make them cause I'm too young.

I'm sure the ideas weren't that great, but the critical thinking is more important.

That made me smile!

I remember when I first "discovered" RLE, 8 or 9 years old, sitting in the backseat of my parent's car in this parking lot:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.764966,-87.724457&spn=...

What is RLE in this case? Run-length encoding?

Yes.

I started writing ideas in blue books when I was very young (like 7 or 8). Most were stupid, but a few were good at the time, and in fact later become commercially available products. Of course, I always thought "Hey! I thought of that first, but I'm eight and can't do anything about it".

I only did this sporadically (regrettably - not only would I have a lot of ideas by now, but I'd have something humorous to look back at and/or give my kids), but I started having lots more ideas toward the end of my undergrad time and during grad school. My idea generation dipped for a while after grad school because, you know, life gets in the way. But it has picked back up again as my life has stabilized and I've started keeping a tiddlywiki of ideas. Most bad, a few good. None brilliant.

First non-trivial idea? I don't remember. I think it may have had something to do with a novel way of feeding cows or something like that (I grew up on a semi-working farm). As if cows need a new way to eat.

I've always found a lot of my ideas interesting; it's just that for most of them I eventually proved them to be bad ideas.

Also, interesting ideas are rarely individual insights but usually come from merging two or more different ideas in a new way to create something genuinely cool.

"Also, interesting ideas are rarely individual insights but usually come from merging two or more different ideas in a new way to create something genuinely cool."

There you have it. It's hard to think of interesting ideas we had in the past because we tend to think of ideas as atomic, but those kinds of insights are pretty common and thus not so interesting, it's usually when you have a complex set of inter-related ideas that something really significant and interesting can emerge.

I guess your definition of "interesting" shifts as you mature. I bet I had a load of interesting ideas when I was 14 that I would no longer find interesting now, 10 years later.

I think a lot of the ideas I had as a teenager were basically things I discovered independently, usually in awkward or incomplete incarnations, but would have been "obvious" to someone more educated and older. Or if not obvious, at least fairly easy to research or look up. (linear algebra particularly stands out as one of those things that, had I known it, I would have saved myself weeks of effort)

I wonder whether I'd be better at what I do now if I'd had access to the internet earlier (thus skipped a load of "unnecessary" hard work) or later. (thus developed my capacity for independent thought further) Given my acute case of "programmer's block" right now I'm leaning towards the latter. :-/

I was 4-5. I was drawing these grand fountains and water works systems and my grandfather looked at one and saw that water was flowing uphill and explained in basic terms gravity and the Archimedes principle to me.

After that I always wanted to be correct in my drawings so I got interested in children science books. My mom read me kids science stories/tales. I preferred them to fairy tales.

I was 9. I remember imagining how it would be cool if instead of cells my body consisted of tiny robots that intermeshed together and substituted for various bodily functions. Sorta like nano bots I came to learn about 15 years after

I was 10. it was 1988. Soviet Union. I kept drawing a small submarine with all the life support, buoyancy and structural elements I could think of. I wanted to swim from Chukotka/Kamchatka to Alaska

> I was 4-5. I was drawing these grand fountains and water works systems and my grandfather looked at one and saw that water was flowing uphill and explained in basic terms gravity and the Archimedes principle to me.

Good thing he wasn't M. C. Escher's grandfather! :)

When I was 8 or 9 I came up with a basic design for a perpetual motion machine (it involved little dynamos on a track, and a ball running back and forth over them). No, I didn't use the term "perpetual motion machine". Anyway, I explained it to my mother who said it wasn't possible.

Well, if I have a kid, I'm going to buy him some dynamos and tell him to build that sucker.

My fear is that, should I ever have a child, it will be completely uninterested in building, reading or learning, and therefore I will be out of my depth. My child would probably be a social butterfly.

In fact, I'm quite sure that this would happen. As jwz says, the universe tends toward maximum irony.

A good friend of my father's reminisced about how when I was 6-7, I would show him my notebooks full of perpetual motion machines.

When I started reading voraciously, I started having better ideas. Reading is a conversation with an author. Most business and entrepreneur-themed books don't offer new ideas, but they're new to you. When you swirl them around in your own head, you'll have better ideas. For me, I always need to visualize ideas to, so I paper prototype a lot.

"When I started reading voraciously, I started having better ideas."

I've noticed this too.

Reading several books at a time - interleaving chapters - makes me see new connections.

If you're efficient about coming up with interesting ideas, you'll come up with a lot that are just outside the bounds of what's obvious, given your current knowledgebase. When you're younger, not only is your knowledgebase relatively small, but there have also been a lot of people with very similar knowledgebases before you... the result is that that space is pretty heavily tapped, and most of the "actually interesting" ideas you can have are well known to more knowledgeable folks. Before you learn enough to have an interesting starting point, the odds are against your getting interesting results.

In other words, there's at least factor beyond your control in having an actually interesting idea: You can't control what's ultimately considered interesting for its time.

For me it's not only interesting when i started having ideas (probably because I can't really remember) but also when I'm having "interesting" ideas...

For me it's mostly when I'm stressed out. For example when I was learning for exams I very often had interesting ideas I started to dissect and analyze. Even though the ideas were interesting and intriguing, I quashed most of them because from a business perspective (and that is my background) I could see the idea prosper. I too write most of my ideas down so I can use them later or use them as inspiration.

I'm guessing around 10 years old (but perhaps even earlier) when I decided to design and build a briefcase containing various hidden compartments.

I also remember, before that, reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye and being impressed that Luke could recharge his lightsaber from Han's blaster and spent a long time working on designs for universal plugs and sockets that would allow arbitrary recharging between devices. I am still waiting for this to be possible.

But well before that (say around 6-7 years old) I recall drawing devices (just can't tell you what they did!)

When I was 5-7 I would always take apart any broken electronic and try to figure out what it did. Obviously, except for understanding the connection between the parts, LEDs and switch most of the stuff didn't make much sense.

But my goal was to understand electronics enough to modify a cell phone, so I could use it as a telephone jack that I could plug in a laptop (wireless 56k modem). I though it could revolutionized the world.

Obviously this wasn't the best approach for this problem, but I was still pissed when I saw the first wireless internet cards from Telcos.

So for me the specific example I was thinking of was this:

"it's damn hard to get into an Ivy League school. Even valedictorians and kids with perfect SATs are rejected from their top picks every year. But athletes got into the best schools even with mediocre grades...

Let's think about this logically. To get into an Ivy as just a student you basically need straight A's, 1400 SATs, and lots of extracurriculars. This meant I'd have to go to school eight hours a day, do two or three hours of extracurriculars, and then go home to six or so hours of homework. As an athlete A's and B's are fine as long as you don't have any C's, and you don't need any major extracurriculars other than your sport. That's what the coaches will tell you when you're being recruited at least, but in reality a couple C's are usually fine if you just want to go to an Ivy but you don't much care which. This would require going through the motions of being a student, and then practicing a couple hours a day year-round. Same result, less work, more fun!"

The logic behind this doesn't really make sense unless you're stuck in the mentality of a zero-sum world. That said, this thinking seems to have been a precursor of sorts to later and more interesting musings on zero-sum systems.

I can only remember a handful of specific ideas I had before that which I'm still vaguely impressed with today.

I honestly don't remember, but my mom swears I 'invented' the idea of a maglev train when I was five or six. Although, according to the drawing I made at the time, my solution for keeping the train on the tracks was to build walls on either side, so I'm not sure how I expected people to board or exit the train :D

Typical train platforms are tall enough to keep a train on the tracks. Five-or-six-year-old you may have had that in mind. Maybe you accidentally drew the walls too tall.

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=jx/sb/svx2.jpg...

I started to have good ideas since I am inspired by games in the Kindergarten. The same way I have ideas today. I feel that they are good and when I try to think about it, I know why ... they are often new "Mashups" of existing techniques and ways to do things.

Interesting ideas? I don't know, at least before age 8. I know that because at that age I was drawing designs for flying machines based on something I heard about a supposed link between electric charge and gravity... in other words, either pseudoscience or taken out of context (high-energy physics, maybe?).

I realized this when I built an apparatus to test it: a crude Van de Graff generator on a scale. I ran it for a while but despite building up a small charge (it ran on a 9V battery), the weight remained unchanged. I was disappointed.

Over time, my ideas have become more practical. Still, I occasionally have urges to create a bipedal robot or a better coffee machine :)

I've found that interesting ideas come mainly from current life experiences combined with something that happened to you in your past. By this I mean current inspiration (ex: weekend snowboarding trip) that brought about a great idea for a product, then that idea is refined by your beliefs of what you feel a great product should really be. These beliefs are mostly derived from your childhood believe it or not. But most of all interesting ideas come from finding interesting things in the day to day grind.

My interesting ideas in life always came when there were girls around I wanted to impress. As I get older, they come not so often. I read that the most inspired works of Romantic and Classical composers were all written before age 25 with a big exception being Beethoven's and Mozart's final symphonies. It's believed the inspiration behind those symphonies was brought on by the illnesses that killed them.

When I started asking interesting questions. :)

Could you point out some examples of this research? I guess it has something to do with events and routines being episodic memories, whereas abstract ideas is more of a metacognitive/executive task?

Actually, the ideas themselves would be declarative, if there were details involved. Now I'm confused. Would like to read about.

I'm not really sure what area of research this would fall under. The closest I can think of is "infantile amnesia," although that would be a stretch. As far as I know there is no established way to classify ideas, so that would make this a question not very well-suited for academic research. Actually, one of the reasons why I asked is because I'm interested in looking for patterns in what people consider to be interesting ideas. So far there are a lot of parallels with the answers that people here have been giving for the "what have you discovered" question, which is amusing, albeit not especially surprising.

If you are interested in infantile amnesia though, this paper is kind of interesting and gives a decent overview of the different theories:

Harley, K. & Reese, E. (1999). Origins of autobiographical memory. Developmental Psychology, 35, 5, 1338-1348.

According to my understanding of Piaget's developmental stages, the earliest a child can have "inventive" thought is in the concrete operational stage. Children enter this stage during school years, but before puberty. It's during this time that children begin to grasp basic scientific concepts like conservation of volume.

However, I didn't pay all that much attention in developmental psych, my textbook isn't handy, and the Wikipedia article is not all that helpful. :)

Researchers have found that most of Piaget's milestones actually happen much earlier than he had thought. Basically new methodologies have been invented to simplify the questions so that children can show competence at an earlier age. Before many children had been failing to perform at things they were able to do because the tasks involved ancillary things they were incapable of, for example they relied on background knowledge that wasn't there or unrelated motor skills that hadn't yet developed. I'd be interested in seeing what Piaget's methodology was compared to the current state of the art in terms of measuring inventive ideas.

Probably around age 4, although at the time, most of them had to do with aliens, robots, and dinosaurs.

I realize it's not the main point of this question, but I don't get the Set Godin's idea. If more people were telecommuting, then the in-person interaction would become more scarce, therefore more demanded, so the expectations for the quality would be lower I would think?

You would expect that your counter-party puts in more effort, I would say.

Every interesting idea I get, later turns out to be a rehash. Especially the ones I fall in love with. It's some kind of deficiency, wonder if it can be cured.

... or used!

Junior in high school as I read Aristotle's Ethics.