Title: Isaac Asimov Mulls “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
Context: Might be a good idea to take advice on good ideas from a guy who had more good ideas than most people have had ideas.
Synopsis: The best kinds of ideas are the truly creative ones. The ones no one—or almost no one as far as you know—has ever had before. Ideas are easy. Most of us have a few dozen before we are even done brushing our teeth in the morning, but good ones? Creative ones? These are much harder to come by. Mostly because we don’t know where they come from. We build businesses and processes and meetings around the idea of coming up with ever better ideas. But is there a recipe we can follow to guarantee creativity? Is innovative thinking reproduceable? By definition creativity breaks the bonds of traditional thought to generate unique perspectives so the odds of there being a formulaic and guaranteed methodology for fruitful ideation is not likely. The only constancy across the timeless and universal pursuit of singular thinking would seem to be a general disregard for any bounding rulesets put in place to limit one’s unbounded mental process. Free your mind, and the creativity might possibly follow. Maybe.
Best Bit: “It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.”
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