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How to get new ideas

paulgraham.com

11–20 of 222 posts

Re: How to get new ideas

#15

My algorithm for generating ideas: https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas

Using combinatorial mechanics to generate new ideas is a powerful technique, perhaps first popularized by Ramon Llull in his Ars Magna (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull). Similar techniques are also used in TRIZ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ).

The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and experience to judge which generated ideas are good.

Re: How to get new ideas

#16
Lots of truth to this. Just start building. Build for yourself and real people, not imagined profiles of people. The more you build, the more you explore, the more you'll find low-hanging useful ideas. As you encounter them it’ll surprise you that the space is mostly empty.

Patio11 tweeted about using ChatGPT to immitate social signaling by rewriting content. I thought that was fun so I started doing it. That grew into Spencer Westford: https://vc.blankenship.io

That grew into a product: https://persona.ink

That keeps snowballing. Ever since building for myself my notebook of ideas is growing faster than I can keep up.

Re: How to get new ideas

#18
I think the key is noticing, which implies being a more passive observer. Most people want to find new ideas, which is being active. I've never had success at actively finding ideas but much more successful just living life, listening and the ideas just come.

Re: How to get new ideas

#20
post #14

I couldn't really parse the header to tell if he authored this essay or if he asked chatgpt to make it up. (If the latter, pretty impressive!)

That's PG. The GPT answer is in the linked tweet.
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