George Newman

of post-it notes and the different kind of machinations that that idea took to really actually very similar to one another.

It's basically just adhesive plus paper.

And so it was finding that great idea was about finding like the right tweak, the right kind of spin or pivot that kind of unlocked something new that was going to be valuable.

And that often takes a lot of work and trial and error.

Absolutely.

I mean, we kind of gloss over those details, especially, you know, looking back when things occurred decades ago.

I kind of think about an analogy even to our own lives.

Maybe if you're telling just the history of your life and the different steps you took along the way,

As we're communicating it to somebody else, in hindsight, maybe it seems like this straight linear path when really, you know, for many of us, there's lots of backtracking and things that we didn't expect and new kinds of windows and opportunities that open up.

And much the same with ideas that there's a lot of trial and error and false starts along the way that in hindsight tend to get glossed over when we tell the story later.

Well, I think there's an important point to clarify.

Sitting down and trying to generate ideas is probably one of the best things that you can do.

But the idea there is to not put too much pressure on yourself and not say, well, this has to be a great idea.

In fact, there's some interesting research that shows that

Sometimes we're our most creative.

We make the most unusual connections when we're low on sleep or, you know, maybe cognitively it doesn't feel like we're at our peak.

We can actually kind of make new connections that we wouldn't otherwise.

So one big thing that I advocate is thinking about creativity as a process like archaeology.

And part of what an archaeologist is doing after they

have surveyed the landscape and kind of understand where they are, and then they've gridded their terrain to make their search more systematic so they know where they're finding things and where they haven't.