(2022-10-31) Eliason The Art Of Fermenting Great Ideas

Nate Eliason: The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas. ...people approach idea generation like baking or cooking, a precise practice that you can squeeze into a 50-minute meeting block or a daily regiment of “write down 10 ideas.” But brines don’t care about your 50-minute meeting block. They bubble when they’re ready

These are the three necessary criteria for a great ferment: great ingredients, the proper environment, and patience.

What makes fermentation so magical is that the most important ingredient is the one you can’t control: the bacteria.

Ideas and bacteria have a lot in common

design the best possible environment for the good ones to thrive and multiply

III: Ingredients

your brain is always fermenting something

Whatever you pay attention to is being fermented by your brain.

So if you want to come up with better ideas, you must get extremely strict about what you let in the door.

This is why certain prescriptions, like avoiding the news, avoiding social media, or reading older books, are so helpful

Removal is only the first step, though. You must replace it with the fresh juicy jalapeños you want your brain to be fermenting.

You’re probably assuming I’m going to say “read great books” or “read old stuff” here, but no, that’s not the answer.

The most important food to constantly feed your brain is the problems you want it to be solving (favorite problem)

Maybe one of your problems right now is what to get people for Christmas. You have to define clearly what those problems are and then constantly remind your brain to think about them.

I tag certain Apple Notes with #focus, and then they end up in this smart folder on my home screen. They’re often articles I’m working on or related to my book work, but there are other things, like home improvement projects or other big decisions

But you could do this in plenty of other ways. A sticky tab on your computer, a screenshot on your phone lock screen, a forehead tattoo, the method doesn’t matter.

Obviously, ingredients are only one part, though. They also need the right environment to ferment in.

IV: Environment

Good ideas require boredom. If you constantly ingest new information, the existing information can never be digested

Think of your time as explicitly allocated to loading in information or towards seeing what your brain shoots out. Input time, output time.

We never give ourselves output time because we’re terrified of silence and boredom

V: Time

Ideas sometimes seem to need days or weeks or months to get to a point where they feel fully formed. If you try to force a solution to a problem into a preset window of time, you will almost certainly reach a suboptimal solution.

when you have the space to noodle on something, take it.