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How to get new ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to get new ideas

#181

Post by graeme »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #87
3dsnano wrote: post #40

i think new ideas come from being naive and possessing the "no-mind" or a childlike sense of wonder. the older i get, the less plastic my brain is and the more depression and other issues start to seep in, get in the way, overcomplicate shit. to be completely free, uninhibited, released from guilt and predjudice. to just think, play, laugh, fart, and yawn. boring days spent looking out the window wondering how crows…

I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs pure functionality.

Here’s a quick tip: remove the word “bullshit” from your personality and assume that people aren’t morons.

People obviously do do dumb things, and some stuff is obviously crap. But if you change perspectives a lot of stuff actually….makes sense?

Like, looking at the world and seeing a bunch of bullshit is actually a flaw in your own thinking, not the world.

Take fast food for example. Widely derided, clearly poisons the body, not the best taste, produces a lot of waste. More expensive than cooking.

But, flip it around:

* Standard experience —> you know exactly what you’re getting

* Much cheaper than restaurant food

* Much faster than restaurant or home cooked food

* Tasty

* Easy

It’s something with obvious downsides but also obvious upsides.

It isn’t obviously dumb. It is only obviously dumb if you decide the downsides outweigh the upsides and then ignore all the upsides. Which is flawed thinking.

You can repeat this analysis and find that on their own terms most people mostly aren’t doing things that are totally irrational.

Even something like a lottery ticket gives someone hope despite the clear negative EV. You can take that too far, but….

The point is if you think everything is bullshit, your analysis is probably crap. And merely allowing yourself to use the term bullshit rewards this sort of lazy, negative analysis.

Whatever you sell doesn’t have to be the absolute best of all possible things. But it has to meet a need, and the vast bulk of stuff which sells does exactly that.

Re: How to get new ideas

#182

Post by dragonwriter »

userabchn wrote: post #103
3dsnano wrote: post #40

i think new ideas come from being naive and possessing the "no-mind" or a childlike sense of wonder. the older i get, the less plastic my brain is and the more depression and other issues start to seep in, get in the way, overcomplicate shit. to be completely free, uninhibited, released from guilt and predjudice. to just think, play, laugh, fart, and yawn. boring days spent looking out the window wondering how crows…

We like to believe that the problem is just "our own adult psychosis", but I spend my days around many people over quite a range of ages (including elderly) and it is very obvious to me that cognitive abilities decline in the way shown in the charts you have probably seen (or, it feels to me, even more dramatically) and that it is apparent at an earlier age that we would like to think. Old people lose the ability to…

> Old people lose the ability to infer - if they know two Johns and I say something about one of them (just referred to as "John"), they will be confused even though it should be easy to infer which I meant.

Old people have been bitten by the “A 95% inference will be wrong 1 in 20 times” thing a lot more, and also have been exposed to a wider array of experience where they might often judge an inference as being less certain than someone with a narrower range of experience would.

Re: How to get new ideas

#183

Post by dragonwriter »

adversaryIdiot wrote: post #111
userabchn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We like to believe that the problem is just "our own adult psychosis", but I spend my days around many people over quite a range of ages (including elderly) and it is very obvious to me that cognitive abilities decline in the way shown in the charts you have probably seen (or, it feels to me, even more dramatically) and that it is apparent at an earlier age that we would like to think. Old people lose the ability to…

I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities in your 40's? I don't have a specific reference but if you google it, you should find what I mean.

> I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities in your 40's

different abilities at different ages, on average, but IIRC, some as early as late teens, some as late as the 40s.

EDIT:

Actually, some as late as 50+. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/when-do...

Re: How to get new ideas

#184

Post by corobo »

ok_dad wrote: post #155

I don't need ideas ! I need some sort of "basic income" that allows me to pursue the ideas I have today while providing for a family.

Right! I think we might be the only two on this site who have more ideas than money haha.

How to get new ideas? How do I stop them coming?! My method is to scribble them on a piece of card and chuck that into a tub to get them out the way for now.

I know that tub is being emptied with nothing in there seeing the light of day. Simple fact is if I work on my own stuff I don't get to pay rent or eat this month.

One day. In the next lifetime if not this.

Re: How to get new ideas

#185

Post by Octokiddie »

> Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So I asked: What would I have said?

It's not entirely clear whether or not the essay was written by GPT because it's not clear who PG asked. Himself or GPT?

I'm leaning toward the former, but can't rule out the latter. Maybe that's the point.

Re: How to get new ideas

#187

Post by hooande »

jarrenae wrote: post #152

I feel I can speak to this pretty well, over the past year I've launched 130+ projects as part of https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks and I've come up with ~250+ ideas. Similar to "look for anomalies" my general rule of thumb is to solve some sort of problem, even if it's rather small. So for example: 1. I pick a topic/product. Let's say: Gmail 2. I look for things that I'd like to be able to do, wish I could do, o…

250 ideas is incredible. if only 1% of them grow to have ~$1MM in value (or anything close), you should have two or three real winners by now. If only by pure chance.

I'm really curious about how that's going. I can't quite suss out what your biggest successes are on your website.

Re: How to get new ideas

#188

Post by aeonflux »

bob1029 wrote: post #93
gizmo wrote: post #42

Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become today's good ideas. For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental improvements i…

> One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. Streaming gaming is something I am still laser-focused on. Our networks are only getting faster. I feel there is a gigantic opportunity here that is being passed up by efforts like Stadia. To do this thing correctly, the game engine itself needs to be developed with these concerns in mind. Expec…

MMO seems to be in decline, not due to technical limitation. Also, I’ve just tried GeForce Now and I was blown away. I don’t think that huge changes in the model are practical in order to get 1% improvement over what’s available now

Re: How to get new ideas

#189

Post by somethingreen »

sargstuff wrote: post #121
somethingreen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name 3 things you own or use that were invented (even at conceptual level) by a child.

[1] has more researched 10 list. https://inventionland.com/blog/ten-kid-inventors-that-change...

The fact that one needs to google the list and even then may still fail to answer is kind of the point. The struggle to give an answer is the actual answer.

This myth that children's ideas are somehow more valuable that adult's is nonsense. If this was true, businesses would organize and act on it. Parents would be hired to bring children into brainstorming sessions. Filled idea diaries would be sold and bought in bulk. Sponsored kindergarten and school networks would be established to gain access. Children hackathons with prizes would be held every day of the week. Video games would be designed to siphon ideas.

None of this happens. Because the reality is: children are great, their ideas are useless, most beautiful genius things in your life weren't invented and designed by a child or a nameless enlightened being in a tropical bungalow, but by a perfectly boring adult at their desk in their work time.

Re: How to get new ideas

#190

Post by jarrenae »

hooande wrote: post #187
jarrenae wrote: post #152

I feel I can speak to this pretty well, over the past year I've launched 130+ projects as part of https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks and I've come up with ~250+ ideas. Similar to "look for anomalies" my general rule of thumb is to solve some sort of problem, even if it's rather small. So for example: 1. I pick a topic/product. Let's say: Gmail 2. I look for things that I'd like to be able to do, wish I could do, o…

250 ideas is incredible. if only 1% of them grow to have ~$1MM in value (or anything close), you should have two or three real winners by now. If only by pure chance. I'm really curious about how that's going. I can't quite suss out what your biggest successes are on your website.

That's definitely one of the goals that I'm tracking for, though I want to stress that profitability per project isn't the main goal, so some of these projects have no immediate monetization strategy. Additionally, the projects are of a pretty strict scope (6-24 hours of work) for MVP, so we're mostly trying to improve the overall structure.

In a year I hope to have 2-6 that are decently profitable, and ideally more that are valued in the open source community.

I think a few of the most successful ones so far are:

https://ghostlystock.com/ https://www.barbellformac.com/ https://www.heftysearch.com/ https://www.oldestsearch.com/

combined web traffic is around 5-10k views per month (across the pages you see on the main site)

Side note: I'm improving that page to make finding popular ones easier. Some aren't worth more than a quick laugh/glance, while others are really worth using.

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