Reflections based on Videos “Where good ideas come from” (Steven Berlin Johnson) and “El camino de las ideas creativas” (Elsa Punset), and many other inputs when "incubating".
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Quite a few years ago Archimedes ran naked through the
streets of Syracuse (Sicily) shouting “Eureka”. The reason he did that is
because he had just discovered a physics principle that enabled him to explain
why some object float. This discovery, which changed history and made him
famous for millenniums, was done when having a bath.
Mikel Urmeneta states in Elsa Punset’s video, that he
gets his ideas when he is having a shower. Please, do not waste our most
precious liquid in the planet and your time trying to get ideas with running
water! Ideas do not necessarily come when we are naked, clean or wet. Ideas can
come at any time, especially when we are in a context in which we do not have
certain constraints. Elsa Punset explains that these incubating periods happen
often just before we wake up.
Steven B. Johnson explains that ideas “come” after
long incubating periods (he calls this “the slow hunch” and gives Charles
Darwin’s famous discovery as an example of a long slow hunch. Sometimes we
might “have” an idea, but not realized about it. It is easier to get ideas when
you are surrounded by different stimuli. An idea is a network, and it can come
more easily when the “outside world” also looks like a network. This is more
likely to happen in a coffee house, a big city with many intellects or a online
social network. Sometimes it is good to take time “off”, as ideas can appear
after an incubating period when you are not under stress. A good example of
this is the invention of the GPS. Watch Steven Johnson’s speech end in the TED
video for an interesting story.
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is
dressed in overalls and looks like work”. Thomas Alva Edison
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