The strange phenomenon of new ideas
How to do great work. Keeping your eyes open. The intrusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary. And how ideas just start "coming out" when you pay attention.
In his essay, How to do Great Work, Paul Graham writes about the strange phenomenon of having new ideas. Most new ideas, he argues, are really “just a matter of noticing something obvious that’s right under your nose.” And while seeing the obvious sounds easy, coming up with new ideas is hard. Why? Because “seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world.” Graham is the founder of startup accelerator YCombinator. He helped launch companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Coinbase, and many others. In this essay, he’s referring to new ideas in the context of product development and business. But in many ways, creative work follows a similar path. Great artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, poets, and creatives find material and inspiration everywhere. They have a way of looking at the world where anything and everything can be used in their work. This week, I’m sharing 3 short thoughts on looking at the world in a way that helps you notice the ideas hiding right under your nose.
1. The job is to keep your eyes open
Dire Straits’ frontman Mark Knopfler was in a kitchen appliance store in New York in the early 80s. There was a wall of TVs at the back of the shop, all tuned to MTV. One of the store’s employees, “a real meathead guy,” according to Knopfler, was sounding off about the musicians in the videos. “What the guy was coming out with was so classic,” said Knopfler, “I just sat behind some microwaves and started writing down the lines that this guy would say: ‘What’s that? Hawaiian noises?’ ‘Maybe get a blister on your little finger.’ ‘Yeah, that ain’t working!’” Knopfler paired the lyrics with an iconic guitar riff, and it became Dire Straits’ number one hit Money for Nothing, their most commercially successful song. “Songs come from all sorts of directions and for all sorts of reasons,” Knopfler said. This reminded me of something I heard author Paul Auster say in an interview when he was asked about where he gets the ideas for his stories. “A lot of people just blunder through [life] and they’re not noticing things,” he said. “But if you’re noticing things, then you might notice something that’s very interesting or unusual. That’s the job of a writer—to keep your eyes open.”
2. How we deal with the intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life
In the early 2000s, Stephen King walked out of his hotel in Manhattan and noticed a woman talking on her cell phone. As he watched her, he started to get an idea. He wondered what would happen if she received a message that controlled her in some way. Later, King was walking down the street when he saw a man yelling and screaming to himself. Thinking he was just another crazy New Yorker, King moved to the other side of the street. But as the man moved closer, he noticed this wasn’t a crazy person but a businessman in a nice suit with “plugs in his ears” talking angrily into his cell phone. “All these possible ramifications started bouncing around in my head like pinballs,” King said in an interview with the Paris Review. These two observations on the streets of New York made King think about the way we talk to each other, and gave him the idea for his novel Cell, a story about a mysterious signal known as “the Pulse” that’s sent through cell phones and turns most of the population into violent, zombie-like creatures. King said that the premise for a lot of his novels is a simple observation, something obvious, and that’s right under his nose. “If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life. In every life, you get to a point where you have to deal with something that’s inexplicable to you, whether it’s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it.”
3. “You just have to pay attention.”
In Twin Peaks, the groundbreaking TV show created by David Lynch in the early nineties, there’s a scene in the first season set in the ‘Red Room’. It’s an intentionally bizarre scene intended to depict a surreal, dream-like sequence for the main character. The room itself features bold, zig-zag carpet and heavy, red velvet curtains. The characters move and behave in unsettling ways. Their dialogue is jumbled and hard to understand—an effect which Lynch achieved by having the actors recite their lines phonetically backward and then reversing the audio in post-production. The whole combination of things is eerie and strange. When the scene originally aired in 1990, it was unlike anything else on TV, and it remains one of the most recognizable and “Lynchian” scenes in the Twin Peaks series. Lynch had the idea for the scene after finishing a long day of editing the Twin Peaks pilot episode at a laboratory in Los Angeles. It was six-thirty in the evening, and he walked outside to the parking lot and leaned his hands on the roof of a car, “it was very, very warm—not hot, but nicely warm,” he wrote in his book, Catching the Big Fish. “I was leaning there and—sssst!—The red room appeared. And the backward thing appeared, and then some of the dialogue. That’s how it starts. The idea tells you to build this Red Room….the idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know.” In 2006, CBS produced A Slice of Lynch, an interview with Lynch, the sound engineer, and two of the main actors from Twin Peaks. Lynch is asked about how he came up with all the strange and intricate details in the Red Room scene, and he describes the experience in the parking lot. “These things weren’t there, but they came out,” he says. “You just have to pay attention. Things start, you know, coming out.”
There is no special place or process
Leonard Cohen once said that if he knew where the good ideas came from, “I’d go there more often.” And that’s the thing: There is no magical place. No unique process, talent, or skill. It’s more about noticing what’s happening in front of you—at the kitchen appliance store, in the street, or in the parking lot.
Thank you to Melanie Ritchie, Stephanie Margalis, Matthew Grimson, and John Stormon for reading drafts of this.