I have come to realize that one of the most difficult problems in many areas of life is generating good ideas.
From celebrating a loved one's special day to writing a good essay to running a business, coming up with good ideas that work is at the heart of almost all of it.
This is partly because, looking from a certain point of view, most of life is some form of problem-solving. Finding a good idea for a celebration. Finding a new way to overcome the new growth plateau in the business. Writing a good essay that is unique, interesting, and useful. These are all idea generation problems. You are invariably always in need of good ideas.
To that end, generating good ideas is at the core of everything we do on a day-to-day basis. After all, every good solution is a good idea applied well.
I know the debate around idea versus execution. The claim that the idea doesn’t matter, what matters is execution. A great idea leads to nowhere without equally great execution. However, I feel this debate often misses the point. While execution matters, it matters after the fact that you have a brilliant idea. Great execution of a mediocre idea will still lead to a mediocre outcome. Similarly, an idea that is ahead of or behind its time or genuinely hard to implement means no amount of execution prowess would matter. It means it is safe to say that while you have to execute well in all cases, it is still important to come up with ideas that matter.
Execution only matters once you have an idea. Even if we acknowledge the critical importance of execution, it doesn’t mean we don’t need good ideas. We still need good ideas. Otherwise, what would we execute? And good ideas are difficult to come up with. Maybe more so these days, as many people claim that finding new, original ideas has become difficult as we exhaust the relatively obvious and low-hanging fruit. The assumption is that all good ideas are already taken. Now, if you want to have genuinely good ideas, you have to work genuinely hard. Regardless of whether this is the case or not, coming up with genuinely unique and equally consequential ideas in any field is hard.
It is more so in the world of startups. Coming up with startup ideas is hard. Coming up with startup ideas that work is even harder. This much is evident when you look at the number of businesses that eventually don’t work.
I have always loved reading about how people come up with ideas. How writers, designers, painters come up with ideas, how founders come up with ideas. It provides a particular window into how people think and work through their thought process to generate ideas.
In this article, I compile some of my favorite canonical essays on coming up with ideas, particularly startup ideas. These are some of the pieces I often go back to when I’m in a terrible thinking block and in need of inspiration.
Enjoy!
1. How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham
The founder of Y Combinator and one of the most influential thinkers of our time, Graham, offers fascinating and equally practical ideas about how to come up with startup ideas that work.
One key idea in the essay is that the best ideas come from problems the founders themselves have, that they can build, and that few others notice are worth doing. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.
2. Organic Startup Ideas by Paul Graham
“The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?
There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants.
Our own startup, Viaweb, was of the second type. We made software for building online stores. We didn't need this software ourselves. We weren't direct marketers. We didn't even know when we started that our users were called "direct marketers." But we were comparatively old when we started the company (I was 30 and Robert Morris was 29), so we'd seen enough to know users would need this type of software.”
3. The Top Idea in Your Mind by Paul Graham
One key idea in this essay is that what occupies our mental "top slot" shapes what we notice. I feel this is such a powerful idea. We should always pay attention to what we occupy ourselves with and how that shapes our reality around us. Apart from generating ideas, this has many other important implications for life.
“I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.”
4. Schlep Blindness by Paul Graham
This is one of the most recommended PG essays, I guess, and it provides an excellent insight into human nature. One central take of the essay is that good ideas get overlooked because they involve tedious work that people instinctively avoid. This means if you are someone with a high tolerance for discomfort, you can beat almost anyone.
“There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task.
No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.”
5. How to Think for Yourself by Paul Graham
“There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.
The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.”
6. Idea Generation by Sam Altman
“It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. You want to be around people who have a good feel for the future, will entertain improbable plans, are optimistic, are smart in a creative way, and have a very high idea flux. These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think.
The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.
Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future.”
7. Where Good Ideas Come From (book) by Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson authors one of the most fascinating books on the subject. His suggest that ideas emerge from "the adjacent possible," liquid networks, slow hunches, and serendipity rather than lone-genius moments. The adjacent possible refers to the realm of new ideas that are within reach based on society's current available information, resources, and abilities.
8. You and Your Research by Richard Hamming (1986 Bell Labs talk, still circulated as an essay)
This is one of the most fascinating things I have read on the internet. I have also written a piece on the importance of solving hard problems based on this essay.
This is not startup-specific, but foundational on what separates people who do great original work from those who don't; it covers working on important problems, courage, and reading less so you think more independently. If you read all the time what other people have done, you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do: get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully.
9. A Technique for Producing Ideas (book) by James Young Webb
I first came across this book through Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings (now The Marginilian) many years ago. Then I tried to write a review of the book myself. It provides a five-stage model (gather material, digest, incubate, illumination, verify) that pre-dates and influenced most of the above.
10. How to Pick a Business Idea That Won't Make You Miserable by Amy Hoy
Amy runs a popular online course on building internet businesses. In this essay, she argues for starting with a market/audience you're passionate about rather than a problem
12. Finding Ideas for Your Next Project Through Idea Extraction by Nathan Barry
Nathan is the founder of Kit, formerly ConvertKit. He offers a very pragmatic approach to coming up with business ideas. From Nathan: “Idea Extraction is really pretty simple. Talk to potential customers to find their pain. Once you come across a painful problem, validate it with other companies in the same industry. Then find out how much these companies are willing to pay for this problem to be solved. This is the most accurate way to determine how painful the problem really is.”
I don’t essentially fully agree with this view. Partly because people are bad at talking about their problems. If you ask people whether something is a big problem for them, they would probably answer affirmatively. Because people often try not to upset others by disagreeing. And also, people are usually bad at identifying their problems. However, this is a good alternative framework to use along with the rest of the ideas in this article.
These are some of the best essays I have come across on the subject of idea generation on the internet. Collectively, they offer a set of useful frameworks to come up with useful ideas.
Often, we ignore the importance of finding good ideas. We assume ideas come when they come.
But that is simply not true.
You need to cultivate the skill of idea generation to have truly useful and unique ideas. It means, apart from learning where to look for great ideas, as Paul Graham mentioned in several of his essays, you need to cultivate a mindset where ideas can surface.
We live in a tremendously noisy world today. Thinking is hard. Hamming’s advice of not reading too much is an apt one for our time. We are constantly on. We live in an environment that makes thinking hard. That’s why trying to adopt a mindset that can generate useful ideas is incredibly important in today’s environment. If you can do that, you will be ahead of most of the people. It means trying to still the mind, being curious, adopting habits like journaling and taking notes, and also developing a keen sense of observing what’s going on around us and an acute sense of being able to see beyond the apparent.
In fact, these are useful skills even beyond idea generation.
