My partner Alan Spoon pointed me to this New Yorker article on the neurophysiology of Eureka moments. Only the abstract is available online so you’d have to find the full article the old-fashioned way.
Serendipity and depth of insight are often the result of lots of preparation & activity yet they frequently require a moment of calm to reveal themselves. Even in crazy startup environments, or, perhaps, especially in crazy startup environments, it is important to take the time to smell the roses and give a chance for insight to bubble up. Otherwise you may find yourself going through walls more frequently than going around them, which can be painful for a fledgling startup organism.
To know how to solve problems is a great startup skill. An even better startup skill is knowing how to avoid having to solve problems.
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I find that the “moment of calm” can be engineered if you know yourself well. In my case, I have my best moments of insight when I get away from the computer for 20 minutes and write my thoughts out the old-fashioned way on a small pad of paper – as a stream of consciousness process.
I do this on nearly a daily basis, and it serves to generate all kinds of ideas or different combinations of existing issues. But the regularity of the process is also extremely helpful. I almost look forward to it and it’s like the ideas start lining up in advance of this daily process.
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