How New Ideas Arise

For me there's a spiritual element to it too. Some people just "get ideas from somewhere".

The more ideas you have, the more you get. I expressly try to have ideas and combine different things or inspirations together.

I use "writing is thinking" to develop ideas, I've been journalling ideas since 2013 and they're all computer software related. I am up to 700 entries. Links are in my profile.

I also publish submit ideas on halfbakery.com under the user chronological.

One thing I learned recently though is that to follow through with an idea requires 100s of skills. I don't want to get stuck in a local optimum of trying to create say, a perfect piece of futuristic piece of software perfectly or a new programming language perfectly on first try. I need to just go out and do stuff and explore by doing things with my ideas. Sure I'll have digressions where I explore an interesting idea, but the important thing is I try to keep doing different tasks that get me nearer the ideas' aims.

Strange to not see one of the most common ones:

Ideas arise from physical movement.

I believe Nietzsche was famous for saying this, but is true for many brilliant thinkers such as Aristotle & Plato(School of Athens shows this), Kierkegaard, Seneca, and Kant to name a few.

> Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel… Sitting still… is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.

I would also add that ideas are EMERGENT, i.e. the underlying components of an idea “self-assemble” into a picture either in one person’s imagination or in the collaborative imagination of two or more individuals, such as in a conversation or a joint white board session.

I believe that the process of emergence is fundamental to our sense of perception.

There is an interesting approach to systematically generating new ideas called TRIZ, which Samsung utilizes. The basic concept involves thinking about the ideal solution first. Typically, this means maximizing contradictions instead of trying to minimize them. For instance, imagine a bridge that works, but doesn't physically exist. You’ll get some kind of teleport. Or imagine a lamp that works, but doesn’t exist. You’ll get some kind of luminous space. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

When I come up with only one new idea a day for a business or technology that would require a team to develop, it's because it's not a very inspirational day.

I'm well aware there are teams and leaders all over the place with far fewer ideas than would be best, or almost nothing at all, but they're not my teams.

That's not what I'm trying to do anyway, I've already got a lifetime of those.

Far more rare are the concepts which could really be brought to life starting with almost no resources at all.

Already got a lifetime of those too, but it's the implementation that brings it to life and before making the next commitment to my long-standing top choice, I've always remained open to alternatives that pop up all the time. That's how the top choice gets to be the top choice.

Very different people are capable of having very different types of abundance.

I'm reminded about the lady that cleans out Willie Nelson's tour bus.

You can only imagine what she has found over the years.

He's such a prolific songwriter but he publishes only the best of the best. And even then most of them are not absolute smash hits. Only a small handful have achieved that status even though the whole body of his work is very highly regarded.

But each time the tour bus is cleaned, she picks up all the little scraps of paper that Willie has jotted down a few things on, and fully disposes of them completely.

Well aware that at least a few would be more suitable for the radio than people are generally hearing at the time from some other more popular artists.

You can't let that kind of stuff fall into the wrong hands.

Patrick Gunkel spent a lot of time thinking about Ideas and their ecosystem. How they arise. How they are related. Much of this never made it to academic publication but here is a website that curates some of his work: http://ideonomy.mit.edu/

It will be great to advance the understanding of this work.

However, new ideas almost never arise from walking through a list about how new ideas arise.