Put it on the crazy pile: Ideas and creativity | Hacker News Reader

Put it on the crazy pile: Ideas and creativity

bastian.rieck.me

123 pointsTopolomancer27 comments

In the golden years of Disney's animation industry, the animators kept a bulletin board out in the hallway between the studios where each animator worked. This board was dubbed "the goodie board". If you came up with a concept, a sketch, a shot, that didn't work for whatever you were doing but which you liked anyway, you could pin it to the goodie board, where others were welcome to take it wholesale or crib from it.

I kept this idea for my own use. If I have an idea in a story I'm working on and it doesn't quite fit, but I like it anyway, I save it to my own goodie board. On rainy days I poke through it, and oftentimes I find something worth reusing in another context.

In the “Office Ladies” podcast (where actresses from the TV show The Office recount their days working on it), they mention the writers had a similar “candy bag” they’d put ideas in when they couldn’t work them in the episode they were working on, from which to pull down the line.

To much rationality or filtering early on in creativity detrains your mind from being creative.

No dopamine on discovery of the new, prevents that circuitry from running after a while. Write it down, filter it later. Celebrate even ridiculous ideas and approaches, consider them not "failed" nonsense, but in-between-steps as your subconcious works on the next, better solution. Let self-critique not be negative "Ridiculous, never would work with the physics we got" but more "constructive" -"that would be great if we could get it to fly".

Also remember, that your subconscious works with the knowledge it got. It needs input, to create strange mashups. Get your input way outside of your field to not be stuck in the solutions of your peers.

If you liked this article and want to read someone's Ideas.md, I journal my ideas in the open on GitHub as README.md files. There are over 450+ entries of software and startup ideas.

When I get to around 100 I start a new repository.

They range from desktop software ideas to parallelism, concurrency, futuristic ideas.

They're sectioned and a few paragraphs to a page each.

Startups https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups

Ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas

Ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2

Ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3

Ideas4 (what I'm working on at this time, maybe start here if you're interested in algorithms)

https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4

I want people to read them and most of all, I want to see my ideas in the wild.

The more you force ideas onto a page the more ideas you get. The author of this page experiences the same thing.

This is useful! I gotta say it reminds me of how South Park mocks the idea space:

“Maybe, like Adam Sandler is a monk, like but in space, and he has to build a go-cart with like, Barbara Walters”

Do you find that having a sense of humor about some ideas helps your method?

Sometimes I’m still trying to tune my “good idea” / “bad idea” PID loop. It can be discouraging to see the really dumb ones I thought were great for a few hours ;)

I would suggest writing your ideas to the page helps you develop your inner capability of having ideas and explainability to other people. Ideas are part of your innermost thoughts. Even if you're worried they're bad to other people, the process of writing the idea shall improve your future ideas. My list of ideas is unfiltered. I just think they're what I want to see.

There's so much unexplored territory out there, good stuff is waiting to be found and integrated.

The future is unevenly distributed. Good ideas are found in pockets everywhere. We need to merge the good ideas together. But first we need to aggregate them.

Loved some of these, reminds me of my own list of wild things I'd love to build but can never find the time for.

Totally agree with the sentiment of this post. My crazy pile is named “My Half-Bakery”.

I revisit it often to refine and ponder and/or add. It has helped inspire patents and given me insights in connecting things that otherwise would nag me to a point of being distracted. I’ve found the “Lateral Thinking” ideation approach championed by Edward De Bono [0] helpful as a tool to realize disconnected concepts that nag me as related in someway means their is something interesting there. While not always obvious, after entering the vague thought it gives me a mystery to solve as to “why do I sense a relationship there”. Many times that eventually leads to an “aha” and then validation that it feels so obvious now in retrospect. Those moments are rare but exhilarating when they happen.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking

You might like the website, half bakery.

Here's the homepage. https://halfbakery.com

Here's my profile page of my ideas there https://www.halfbakery.com/user/chronological

I use Obsidian for this exact purpose. Anytime I have an idea, I open up Obsidian, hit ctrl+n for a new note, give it a title, tag it with '#idea', and write whatever I think is nessecary to understand it in the future. Since each idea is a separate file, I won't be tempted to worry about ordering. Obsidian also lets me link related ideas together and it's easy to find an idea again in the future and add some notes to it.

Like the author, I've found that writing down my ideas greatly increases the amount/frequency of new ideas I have. I went from having a decent new idea maybe once a week to now having multiple decent new ideas a day. The problem now is focusing on one idea at a time without getting distracted by all the shiny new ideas.

Love it, I have the same. "GoodIdeas" in my Vim potwiki(0). Most of them I shared in passing, maybe one or two I hold on to actually being special. Have often thought of an anonymous twitter feed as an alternative.

[0] https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1018.

How does this compare with VimWiki?

https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

There is no markup in the former, you just get highlighted words whenever there is any (capitalized) camel case word. Hit enter on the word and you get to the new file. Super lightweight, super efficient.

I don't render most of the notes I take, but will write draft in markdown from time to time. The wiki is in a git repo, of course, that I commit to once in a while.

I really like the notion that you capture the idea at a point in time but purposely revisit the list on a regular basis. I've had similar experiences where coming back to an idea after a few months allows me to express it in a more refined way. Capturing the initial thought in a simple text file reduces the mental burden and allows temporal arbitrage.

I have a folder on Dropbox called “Highdeas” just for this. For me it’s not even about logging them so that I can come back to them but just so that I can move on.

I hate the feeling of "oh I had a great idea yesterday, that was so cool, what was it again? Oh no, is it gone?"

So I also try to make sure I get them jotted down. I used to use Dropbox, I think I will switch back to it again.

It is constantly happening to me. The "I know there was something on my mind just now and I think it was important, but I can't remember what it was".

I hope it's a common thing and not a sign of mental problems x)

As someone who keeps an ideas file as well as files for quotations, new words I learned, and Hacker News submissions I didn't have time to read, I think it's freeing for my mind but I find that I never go back to review them. I found it surprising that the OP has the discipline to set aside time once a month to go back and review his file.

> I think it's freeing for my mind but I find that I never go back to review them.

I've been thinking about using spaced repetition for this. Ideas could just be dropped in spaced repetition software as a flashcard for you to be reminded of later when you review your daily flashcards. You can respond to seeing the flashcard in four ways:

1. The idea looks stupid now, delete it.

2. I still find the idea interesting, remind me soon/prioritize it.

3. I find the idea less interesting right now, wait a long time before reminding me again/deprioritize it.

4. Work on that idea today.

I love the "ideas.md" concept and live by it. I had so many ideas that I turned them into a newsletter[0] (which was also an idea on the list, of course).

The utility of idea notebooks is infectious. I agree with the author in the places you'd expect -- I love being able to get the idea out of my head and clear my head.

One thing I do differently is I actually have an "abandoned" notebook which has ideas that I decided aren't worth pursuing, and I always put a note as to why. I think simply deleting them leaves the possibility of having the same idea again and forgetting why you abandoned it.

When I started the newsletter I had ~300 ideas written out with varying levels of research and thinking behind them (mostly noting leverage points, competitors, where the concepts were mentioned around the internet, leads, etc), that list today is 469 ideas long (so roughly +169). I can't say every idea is good but most of them are at least worth mentioning to someone else in passing.

I have a completely separate notebook of ideas for weekend projects, which has 174 notes in it right now.

I don't see how anyone can not do this -- there's just too much promising information, new techniques, and technology flying by (especially for people in the HN crowd). It feels impossible not to at least ruminate on how you could use the absolute plethora of tools available today to do something interesting.

Even if it's not about building software (which I skew towards), even something simple like "watching TV" is non-trivial these days -- if I asked you to watch the "best" TV that the world has produced in the last 12 months, how would you even start finding it? Wouldn't it be fun to compile and accomplish that?

The idea has been lurking around my head for a while, but I think that the vast majority of humans are hard-wired to make progress -- to endeavor/strive for something. Most people aren't happy to sit idle and accomplish nothing most of their lives.

Recently I set up a HedgeDoc instance[1] so I can share some of these ideas with other people as well.

[0]: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io

[1]: https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc

I hate the feeling of forgetting an idea but also have a hard time finishing something before a new thing comes along. So it’s a bit of a catch 22. I want to write down the ideas, but if it’s written down I tend to start researching and figuring out code structure in my head.

I do something similar. My favorite thing about it is that it allows me to keep momentum. When I start to get bored of whatever I'm currently working on, I can open up my ideas file and daydream about the next thing. Having something else to look forward to is very motivating for me. It both makes it more likely that I'll finish my current project, and prevents me (most of the time) from falling into a rut where I don't know what to do next.

Totally right. What no one's mentioned yet is the immense value of someone who can listen to your crazy idea, and just play around with it. Someone who accepts that many of your ideas, or even most, are crazy, but you never know which one might not be.

Or if it IS crazy, maybe there's some variation that isn't.

I have been using this method for about 10-15 years. I have just a big ideas.txt file where I write something everyday. I don't usually think too much if the ideas even make sense, they're mostly unfiltered thoughts.

Now push Ideas.md to GitHub and share it!

A corporation took my best ideas and went to market before I could even get started. I didn't make any money but at least I have the feeling of community. /s

I know right! It's much more soothing for me if I have a giant Ideas.md so when someone actually does all of the hard bits (implementation and execution) then I can say "I thought of that", and take comfort in rationalising my lack of discipline and drive to factors outside my control, further re-enforcing my intellect and egos tight binding and creating excuses that had circumstance not looked unfavourably on me, I would also be a billionaire, rather than accept the actual truth of my own inadequacies.

Further to that goal here's my list:

- Flying cars - Life extension though gene editing - AGI to do all of our mental work - Humanoid robots that do all of our physical work - Teleportation machines for instant travelling between points in space - Warp engines on starships - Mind uploading

Now when people come out with these things I can say "I thought of that" like somehow that entitles me (even though these ideas are where everybody else gets to too - i.e. there's no creative originality) - now I dont have to do any work!

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