New ideas
Posted by Rick Ellis on April 24, 2008
John Cage, the famous avant-guard composer, wrote a piece entitled 4’33” (Four minutes 33 seconds), in which the orchestra sits silently, playing nothing during that time. His point was to challenge the notion of what constitutes music.
Brian Eno said that repetition is a form of change. He too was challenging convention.
Paul Graham says that ideas are all around us, but we ignore them because they look wrong. He’s right. Often, things don’t look right to us until someone else does them first. How many times have we said “I wish I had thought of that!”, in response to a clever new concept?
I’ve had a new product idea for about a year. It started as a vague concept that stemmed from my discontent with the state of blogging. Most blogs have a very familiar format, a standardized navigation, categorization, and structure. There is a fundamental similarity of approach, regardless of topic. I’m a little restless and bored with the state of blogging, frankly. I feel like we’re ready for a new iteration of the format.
These feelings produced a small fragment of an idea, which I’ve been wrestling with for the past year. It’s taken many months of thought, tinkering, and staring out the window to hone the idea into something that resembles an actual workable concept. I’m still not in development of the idea, but I finally have enough of a handle on it to consider moving forward.
The point is that ideas take work. They don’t just appear out of thin air fully formed and ready to craft. They come in fragments. In bits and pieces. Ideas are like an onion. You have to peal the unnecessary petals away in order to get at the core. The simplest ideas often take the most work, mostly rejecting all the extra junk that isn’t needed. Linda Tischler said it best: “In an Escher-like twist, the technology that’s simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create”.
So don’t get frustrated if you seemingly don’t have any good ideas. Each of us has ideas, great ones. But they require that we think unconventionally, and most of all, that we be willing to work at them. Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Good post, Rick - it made me mull on the importance of ‘simplicity beyond complexity’: allowing an idea to ferment long enough to get past the original problem (and a notional solution) to something elegant and intuitive.
Some folks (the Apple design team are a good example) can do this on the first pass. For others, it’s more like the Amazon Kindle - there may need to be one or two iterations to get there. Either way, you’re right - it’s hard work…
Posted by Les McKeown from Marblehead, MA on Friday, April 25, 2008