George Newman

who they're talking to, what they're drawing upon, the effort they put in, how much exploration they do, all of those kinds of things that are much closer to the process and the environment seem to matter much more than who the person is.

And one very nice data point which supports this is that throughout history, you have this very fascinating phenomenon of what's called multiple discovery,

where multiple people arrive at exactly the same idea and these are big ideas like the idea for the telescope or the thermometer or even the theory of evolution where multiple people arrived at this idea at the exact same time suggesting that in some ways the the world was kind of ripe for that idea and it was a process of navigating towards it rather than one special person unlocking it within themselves

Great ideas come about in lots of different ways.

One thing that's really interesting is that there's some research out of Stanford which shows that sitting down and trying to do something quote unquote creative actually can lead people to

come up with fewer ideas and less good ideas overall.

And there's something about the process of when we think, OK, I'm going to do something really creative or mind blowing or great that actually we can kind of psych ourselves out and begin to kind of edit or censor our ideas as we're generating them.

And some of my own work, too, I found that when people think about doing something creative, maybe their minds race to something totally original that's never been done before, when in fact,

It might be much better to build on what's been done in the past and focus on, well, who's this idea really for?

How is it valuable?

So it's a mix.

I mean, sometimes those ideas will happen by happenstance, by chance, but then there's also a lot of

hard work that goes into it.

You mentioned the story of post-it notes and Spencer Silver, which I think is a great one.

And when he discovered the adhesive that wound up being post-it notes, that was actually, he was like pitching that idea internally of different ways he could use his adhesive for

almost eight years.

And he tried a lot of different machinations of the same idea of kind of an adhesive bulletin board.

And then they had these press and peel bookmarks.

And then finally, with a colleague, Art Fry, they wound up on the, you know, for the idea of post-it notes.

But if you think about the different iterations of