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The Top Idea in Your Mind

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#81

Post by JesseAldridge »

While changing your top thought directly may not be feasible, I think you can at least adjust the weights on various competing thoughts. For instance, my aunt is the president of a teacher's union and she recently recruited me to work on their website. She's paying me $25 an hour. I can feel the money pulling around my ankles like quicksand. It would be dangerously easy to get sucked into making web pages for the rest of my life. I tell my friends about the job and they say, "That's great!" and their respect for me increases palpably. I can tell they don't really understand startups and hacking and have been thinking of me as just being kind of a bum all this time.

But I tell myself: "This is not what I want to do with my life. I'm doing this as a favor to my aunt. I'm doing this on the side, just to make enough money to keep working on the stuff I really want to work on. That is my real focus, designing web-pages is not." And then when people say, "That's great!", I tell them the same stuff I told myself. I think saying the words out loud to others helps me convince myself on a deeper level.

So maybe by affirming your own values you can allow what you really want to be focused on to naturally rise above the petty stuff.

I also agree with disputes being a huge distraction. One guy I used to work with is extremely contrary by nature. He would argue with anything I said, seemingly out of habit more than anything else. After arguing with him, I would invariably find myself turning over the argument in my head and having a hard time focusing on work. Eventually I decided the guy was hurting me more than helping and that I needed to stop working with him. There were several other factors involved, but that was a big one.

One way to avoid disputes like that is to be single founder. Or at least seek out a co-founder who is agreeable. I watched an interview with Larry and Sergei the other day. They were asked, "What do you guys argue about?" and they seemed kind of stumped for a moment before one of them said, "We don't really disagree about much..."

This essay also helps explain the vague sense of frusteration and despair I feel whenever a friend wants to visit, or whenever I need to visit my family. Inevitably interpersonal relationships end up forcing their way to the top of my brain. Living a monk-like life of isolation is the best way I know of to focus on real problems.

Lastly, I think it is possible to do "ambient thinking" intentionally. Just sit or lie down somewhere comfortable (but not so comfortable you fall asleep), and do nothing for several minutes. Time passes amazingly slowly when you're doing nothing, so you don't need to worry about wasting time. Your mind will naturally start defragmenting itself and playing with various ideas -- at least mine does.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#82

Post by gruseom »

DTrejo wrote: post #29

Nassin Taleb calls this "glander." Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity." More on Glander by Taleb: "It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does.…

What a marvelous paragraph. It almost makes me want to give Taleb a second chance (Fooled by Randomness did nothing for me). This is a sharp observation:

Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school.

I'm reminded of someone (maybe John Taylor Gatto) who wrote about the education he got as a boy from long hours spent at a pond.

Also interesting that while he addresses the lack of similar words in Arabic and Italian, he doesn't mention the lack of such a word in English, which of course is the only reason he's writing the paragraph to begin with. "Idleness" is loaded with a Protestant strain of the moralism he's objecting to. I suppose colloquialisms like "hanging out" and "chilling" convey something of the idea, but lack its generative core. "Reverie" comes to mind as having a similar quality; telling, perhaps, that it too is French.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#83

Post by bootload »

"... If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. ..."

Sage advice. It doesn't always work because you can't control what you think all the time but a good, "habit of mind".

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#84

Post by Mz »

grellas wrote: post #55

There is a lesson here about lawsuits, which will drain you of both money and peace of mind all at the same time. Sometimes you can't turn the other cheek, much as you would like to do so, and have no choice but to fight. Having the guts to stand up for yourself (or for your company) is in itself a virtue and there are times when it is best not to walk away. Unless you are in such a spot, though, always consider that…

For many situations, having really good radar so you know how to avoid stepping in it before it puts you on a slippery slope is the only hope of avoiding the necessity to take a stand. I'm fortunate in that I seem to have a natural knack for such things (and have intentionally honed it with both formal and informal study). Of course, one problem with being good at something like that is that it essentially cannot be proven. Avoiding trouble often doesn't look to other people like one has done anything. :-/

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#85

Post by bootload »

m_myers wrote: post #14

That's funny; I'm almost sure I've read the same basic idea somewhere else within the past year or two, but I can't for the life of me remember where. I thought it was Joel on Software, but a little Googling didn't turn it up. Anyone else?

"Ramen Profitable" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html and "Ideas for Startups" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#86

Post by bootload »

m_myers wrote: post #14

That's funny; I'm almost sure I've read the same basic idea somewhere else within the past year or two, but I can't for the life of me remember where. I thought it was Joel on Software, but a little Googling didn't turn it up. Anyone else?

"Ramen Profitable" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html and "Ideas for Startups" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#87

Post by megablast »

pg wrote: post #66
nostrademons wrote: post #45

I suspect that one of the major reasons why big companies are incapable of innovating is that the top idea on most employees minds' is "What is my boss thinking about me?" Followed closely by "What are my coworkers thinking about me?" Social approval is a powerful motivator, particularly when that social approval is essential for your continued livelihood. Only the most self-confident (or delusional ;-)) people can c…

Actually there was a paragraph about this in the essay that I cut: The Nile Perch quality of disputes may help explain why large organizations are so unproductive. The size of large organizations insulates them from the forces that keep smaller ones in line. Questions tend to be decided instead by political battles, and such disputes have a terrible cost because they push other ideas out of all the participants' head…

I would suggest that the same people drawn into big companies are the same people drawn to working for the governments. Because they have job safety, are not pushed to hard, have a rigid work boundaries, and can play the politics game.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#88

Post by megablast »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #81

While changing your top thought directly may not be feasible, I think you can at least adjust the weights on various competing thoughts. For instance, my aunt is the president of a teacher's union and she recently recruited me to work on their website. She's paying me $25 an hour. I can feel the money pulling around my ankles like quicksand. It would be dangerously easy to get sucked into making web pages for the res…

Sorry, I do not see the problem of actually working and getting paid, while working on your own projects. How else are you living? (You sound like someone out of college who has not worked before, if this is not the case then ignore that sentence. If you have worked, and are taking a break to pursue your startup, then I completely understand.)

Meanwhile you are learning about doing web pages, and more importantly, dealing with clients.

I do like your point that isolating yourself from many distractions really help you focus, but probalby not a good idea to do it for too long.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#89

Post by alnayyir »

quickpost wrote: post #22
michael_nielsen wrote: post #4

A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes. For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these. For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians,…

I like your idea... it makes me wonder if it's possible to change your own "ground state". It certainly seems like it would be an awesome lifehack if you could change it over time to suit your objectives.

In my experience, yes. I shifted my ground-state from 90% video games to 33% video games + 66% coding.

It's helped a lot, but I would like to push it further.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#90

Post by jseliger »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #4

A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes. For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these. For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians,…

For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc).

Mine is reading. That's why I went to grad school in English, despite the plethora of articles on why doing so is a financially bad idea.

(Well, I went to grad school because I like to read and because I have a backup plan if it fails.)

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