Give Your Ideas Time To Percolate So You Bring Your Best To The Table

Give Your Ideas Time To Percolate So You Bring Your Best To The Table

It can be exciting when you have a eureka moment. However, rather than spilling the beans on your ideas quickly, you may be better off writing them down and giving them some more time to quietly develop in your mind to mature and complete themselves.

Picture: becosky/Flickr

Writer Sam McNerney shares on his blog:

This shift in perspective highlights a curious aspect of creativity — namely, the concept of percolation. Unfinished ideas that we’re forced to flesh out in an essay, speech, or presentation tend to linger in the mind, spread, and then strengthen. The key is letting those inchoate hunches and intuitions percolate through our neural networks. Every time we travel, sleep, read, or conduct research — anything, really — the mind is hard at work. The goal isn’t to only diligently drill down on an idea but to relax and let it spread, to allow those random associations to happen naturally. This percolation, connection, and subsequent combination are what Dively’s students experienced.

If problem solving is a part of your job, and you’re interested in better creative associations and more refined ideas, let your ideas percolate. When you give it time, your brain can make a good idea even better.

The Sandpit: Creativity and the Power of Random Association [Sam McNerney’s blog]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments