Ideas

In a prior Short Takes article I wrote about articulating big ideas. It’s one of my favorite kinds of writing. But how do we come up with good ideas in the first place? For those of us who write documents for donors, it’s a fundamental question.

Take these articles. I don’t just sit down at my desk and plan ahead for the upcoming year (though perhaps I should). For the most part ideas for Short Takes just pop into my mind, for no apparent reason. Something sparks them; if I don’t write them down immediately, they’re gone.

Learning from the experts
I decided to see what others have to say. In a talk sponsored by the Eric Carle Picture Book Museum, Raúl Colón, illustrator of children’s books and several New Yorker covers, said “Lose your mind to the other…It got me to where I am now.” He quoted the Wright Brothers: “Daydreaming is needed to create anything new.” It was during a leisurely visit to a beach in North Carolina, according to a CNN article, that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Physicist and astronomer Abraham Loeb has said: “Without vacations from distractions, ideas are scarce.”

New ideas can emerge from prior thinking. As described in a Smithsonian article, John Livingston Lowes traced lines in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to his “fiery imagination…fueled by identifiable sources in his library.” Such references may be essential; Coleridge had never been on a boat before writing this well-known masterpiece.

And in a Ted Talk, author Steven Johnson described ideas as “cobbled together from whatever … happens to be around. We take ideas from other people, people we know, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into something new.”

I think it’s fascinating
I love this topic. It’s universal. We all have ideas and there are so many possibilities.

The challenge for me is capturing new ideas before I lose them, and then allowing them to develop into something concretely useful. Here are strategies that have worked for me:

• Write down your ideas. We have so many thoughts simultaneously; new ideas can disappear as fast as they appear. Keep a small notebook handy – or your phone – and capture them before you forget them.
• Let them simmer. Given time, new ideas will evolve and improve.
• Talk with others. Together your ideas and perspectives can turn into something more useful for a wider audience.
• Memorize them. Don’t lose a good idea just because you can’t write it down at that moment.
• Know your patterns. I read a lot, and am learning to be alert to ideas that might be useful later. Sometimes I discover that an idea is a new take on something that’s been rattling around in my mind for quite a while.

We need ideas more than ever
Our world is changing. New ideas inform productive conversations about such urgent issues as equity, the environment, health, and peace. According to Loeb, new ideas must be nurtured in “informal dialogues in environments where mistakes are tolerated and critical thinking is encouraged.”

I find this hopeful. Keeping an open mind about seemingly established ideas can foster new thinking that contributes to meaningful change.