Keywords:: PermanentNote
Reference: R: Where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson p. 112-113, 127-128
New ideas from the outside world induce serendipity in two ways.
First, they can act as triggers that bring a longly held idea into your consciousness.
Second, they provide content from which your brain can produce new ideas (remember – the network's size determines creativity).
Reading remains the best vehicle for acquiring interesting ideas and perspectives. However, it's limited by time and effort.
Your brain needs access to ideas if it wants to enable connections between them.
To access them, they have to be in your memory. However, not everybody can read enough books frequently to have access to new and various ideas.
A way around this is to create a system that removes the need to hold all of these new ideas in your head and instead lets you focus on what is most important - combining, emerging, and connecting.
This knowledge acquisition system should enable easy access to all ideas and facilitate connecting them.
Relevant notes:
PN: You need external input for serendipity: Horizontal projects feed each other with their ideas.
PN: You need external input for serendipity: you need to feed your brain before it can churn out ideas.
For new ideas to appear they not only need spare parts, but they also need time and space. By space I mean moments when you're not consciously thinking or focused on daily tasks and problems. Times when you release and go for a walk, take a shower, meet with friends, meditate, or just simply lay down and do 'nothing'. [1]
To make this process as effective as possible, during this period you must set aside your views and preconceptions about truth and morality and try to uncritically dive deep into the environment. The more you open up, the more you'll be able to absorb. The more perspectives you soak up the more your mind will expand. Each person you interact with will provide you with an additional lens you're able to look at the world (related: PN: You need external input for serendipity).
One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the nature of new ideas. Ideas don't appear out of thin air. They need existing parts to be built from. Each new idea is a new combination produced from what is currently possible. The great thing about it is that whenever a new idea springs up, what is currently possible expands as well.
Furthermore, sharing your ideas with others may become a virtuous cycle for creativity where their feedback – i.e. their ideas – fuel yours, making new, unexpected, and novel combinations possible.
The environment has a powerful impact on how people behave. Other people's ideas make us more creative, we tend to become like the people we spend the most time with, [pictures of winners make us more likely to succeed](TK PN: How to use the environment for your goals). One of the reasons for that is that the environment contains different cues that trigger powerful associations which then influence our choices and actions.
PN: You need external input for serendipity: you need feed your brain before it can churn out ideas.
PN: You need external input for serendipity: new internalized ideas can also act as triggers that release ripe ideas that were longly held in your unconscious.
What you're doing throughout the process is feeding and expanding your mind. Each new idea, concept becomes a building block of your potential mastery. Every new skill you acquire to get those ideas into your brain makes it grow. Each difficulty and crisis you overcome with perseverance is a sign that your mind is growing. (It's like working out—when the muscles hurt, it means that they grow)
Your imagination will “produce” insights based on the “food” you supply your mind with. And what’s best is that you have 100% of control of what goes into your brain. Depending on what you feed your mind, it will churn out ideas that combine the material you’re consciously consuming.