Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

people tend to condense the origin stories of their best ideas into tidy narratives, forgetting the messy, convoluted routes to inspiration that they actually followed.

most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.

Because they are fixed physical structures, most offices have a natural tendency to disrupt liquid networks of information.

You can learn a great deal about the history of innovation by examining great ideas that changed the world.

interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation.

most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful. And more often than not, that missing element is somewhere else, living as another hunch in another person’s head.

But the snap judgments of intuition—as powerful as they can be—are rarities in the history of world-changing ideas.

slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues. But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way.

Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation. You give the hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing, and plant it in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. And then you give it time to bloom.

What Gruber found in the notebooks was a story very different from the account relayed in Darwin’s Autobiography. All the core elements of Darwin’s theory are present in the notebooks well before the Malthusian epiphany,

how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.

The Web came into being as an archetypal slow hunch: from a child’s exploration of a hundred-year-old encyclopedia, to a freelancer’s idle side project designed to help him keep track of his colleagues, to a deliberate attempt to build a new information platform that could connect computers across the planet.

combination of flexibility and connection gave Berners-Lee critical support for his idea. He needed a work environment that carved out a space for slow hunches, cordoned off from all the immediate dictates of the day’s agenda. And he needed information networks that let those hunches travel to other minds, where they could be augmented and polished.

the FBI in the months leading up to 9/11 was a hunch-killing system,

Memories and associations are triggered in a chaotic, semirandom fashion, creating the hallucinatory quality of dreams. Most of those new neuronal connections are meaningless, but every now and then the dreaming brain stumbles across a valuable link that has escaped waking consciousness.

the dream is not somehow unveiling a repressed truth. Instead, it is exploring, trying to find new truths by experimenting with novel combinations of neurons.

The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible.

the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.

Scrambling together two distinct sets of DNA with each generation made for a far more complicated reproductive strategy, but it paid immense dividends in the rate of innovation.

Reproducing asexually makes perfect sense during prosperous periods:

But when the world gets more challenging—scarce resources, predators, parasites—you need to innovate.

the Daphnia pattern repeats itself: the genetic recombinations of sex emerge when conditions get difficult. Swapping genes with another organism is itself more difficult than simple cloning, but the innovation rewards of sex outweigh the risks of the more stable path.

Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you’ve made is meaningful to you.

Serendipitous discoveries often involve exchanges across traditional disciplines.

Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries.

The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state.

carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time.

Modern indexing software like DEVONthink’s learns associations between individual words by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other.

This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of the culture.

there can be little doubt that the Web is an unrivaled medium for serendipity if you are actively seeking it out.

If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.

The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem.

a number of recent studies have suggested that brainstorming is less effective than its practitioners would like.

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine.

at almost every step of the way, de Forest was flat-out wrong about what he was inventing. The Audion was not so much an invention as it was the steady, persistent accumulation of error.

The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. And not just wrong, but messy.

Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

There are few actions as commonly connected to the pursuit of creativity as free-associating.

But psychologists have long been in on the joke that humans free-associate in absurdly predictable ways.

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.

some scientists have argued that natural selection has gravitated toward a small but stable error rate in DNA transcoding,

Bacteria have much higher mutation rates than multicellular life-forms, which suggests that the tolerance for error varies according to the specific circumstances of different organisms.

One of the key advantages to sexual reproduction is that it enables mutated genes to break off from the genes that produce higher rates of mutation.

sex helped harness the generative power of error while mitigating the risks.

it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster.