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A System to Generate Ideas
AKA How to Let Your Brain Be A Brain
Brian Scordato
March 01, 2024
A System to Generate Ideas (aka how to let your brain be a brain)
Sponsor: Tacklebox
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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡
One of my favorite episodes in a while.
This episode exists because the system in it works. Creative ideas that people assume come about through serendipity or the stars aligning are actually the result of a few factors you can plan for. You can build a system to have lots of creative ideas.
The system we describe has four parts:
Identify - choose the big problems you’ll work on
Collect - build systems to pull in high quality inputs
Chew - give your brain structured time and space to make connections between the problem you’re solving and the inputs you collected
Test - run tests with your ideas to see if they’re viable
The pod goes through each with a few examples to help drive it home.
Some nerdy stuff that isn’t in the pod 🤓
A bit of depth on the system that didn’t make sense to include.
Identify. This is about finding a problem that matters and is ignored. Either it matters by potential customers and is ignored by competitors, or it matters to you or someone you love and you’re ignoring it.
Identifying problems is all about strategy, customer interviews, and reflection. Here’s a pod on strategy and a book on strategy that’ll help if you’re stuck here. Proximate vs. Root Causes thinking will help, too.Collect. Way more interesting. Systems to pull in high quality inputs will be rooted by systems to remove bad inputs. That’s the key. Stop doing stuff that kills you immediately.
I have a bunch of tools/methods that I like. Here are a few:Freedom blocks the parts of the internet I don’t want to tempt me
Social Passwords are held by someone who isn’t me and a report is sent to me each week of any notifications. Can use a friend/spouse here, or just create an hour each week where social sites are allowed via Freedom scheduling.
BASB framework helps me know where to send things and how to resurface them. I nerded out and have implemented the whole system, but just the general idea will likely be helpful. Some people love the GTD framework, which also works.
The bigger idea is to have a frictionless home for your ideas as they arise - a process you’re comfortable with that makes it dead simple to save the good stuff you read. For example, when I highlight a passage on my Kindle or in an article I read on a website, Readwise saves the highlight and makes it easy to resurface later.College Curriculums for 101s. For sourcing interesting, high quality content I recommend looking at curriculums for college courses (101s are great). Sociology or Literature 101 at Harvard will have some high quality, timeless books other people probably aren’t reading (including the students in the class 😂).
Condensed learnings. There are a bunch of podcasts, like this, where the founder listens to a book and chats through it. These are great - find them.
Chew. Make space and hold it.
Resurface + Remind
Readwise sends me a bunch of passages I’ve highlighted each day. This is invaluable for reminding myself of the high quality content I’ve ingested.
The Nat Home Screen
Here’s Nat’s homescreen from this post
I use the exact layout and highly suggest it. Remind yourself of the problems you’re working on so your brain has no choice but to chew a bit.
Morning Pages. 20 minutes every morning to write and get whatever is in your mind out.
FYI, Freewrite is my favorite current tool, a typewriter that is ideal for daily journaling (and writing books). It’s expensive, but I’m working on them as a sponsor and will hopefully have a discount soon.
Test - Plenty of this here, but the idea is to take the ideas you have, find the assumptions, and test them in the real world ASAP. This closes the loop.
Build a system and the ideas will come.
The References
Timestamps:
00:26 Idea People
02:47 A Baseball Training Facility
04:45 Inversion
07:46 Smooth Jazz
9:24 Part 1: Identifying the Problem
12:34 Part 2: Collecting
17:22 Part 3: Chewing
20:14 Part 4: Testing
21:37 The End + How to Start
Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:
Today, we’re gonna help you set up a system to generate lots of unique ideas that’ll help you solve hard problems.
We’re doing this because most people have no understanding of where ideas come from - how they’re actually generated. Even people who see themselves as quote idea people just sort of… hope… whatever magic has happened for them in the past continues to happen.
I’ll prove it.
If you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably someone who thinks they’ll eventually have an idea that anchors a great business. Maybe you haven’t had that idea yet, but you’re banking on it.
So, what’s your system for generating that idea?
What are you doing each day to coax that idea out of the ether?
Well?
Oh you thought this was just going to be another 20 minutes of story time where I talk about Ruby and the little guy and maybe make up a pun name for an AI accounting startup for catering businesses? Well think again.
For the record that startup would be called LIFO the party, which I’d give a 7 out of 10 on the pun name scale. And, I’m joking - today will be the 20 minute story thing. Well, from here on out.
But I do think it’s interesting that so many people relying on a great idea don’t know the ingredients or the recipe for that stew.
Luckily, after today, you will.
In 20 minutes or so, you’ll have the beginnings of a system to start generating ideas.
The best part of this system is that it exists almost entirely to help you get out of your own way. Your brain is naturally an idea generating machine. We’re the blocker. If we give our brain guardrails and don’t overwhelm it with junk - if we just let our brain be a brain - the ideas will flow.
As counterintuitive as it might seem, ti be creative, you need to create clear constraints and boundaries.
Today’s idea generating system has been rattling around in the back of my head for over a year, ever since I read a wonderful article by Nat Eliason I’ll pop in the show notes about fermenting ideas.
A year of thinking and tinkering and testing has led to today - a four part system you can incorporate to generate unique ideas. To solve hard problems creatively. To let your brain be a brain.
So, let’s get to it.
And we’ll start, by talking about baseball.
—
Unique Combinations
About a year ago I did an episode that had a segment on a baseball training facility out west for high schoolers that’d produced a disproportionate number of successful college players.
The training facility’s secret sauce was pitch recognition. Meaning, the ability for players to recognize if a pitch is a fastball or a slider or a curveball the instant it leaves the pitchers hand. The sooner you know what a pitch is, the better chance you have of hitting it.
It seems obvious to try to get better at this, but the baseball world has always kind of chalked up pitch recognition to natural ability - you’re either born able to spot a curveball or you aren’t.
But the founder of the facility believed pitch recognition was teachable and learnable skill, and his results support it.
There are two main training eye training stations.
The first is what looks like a traditional batting cage, where you’d practice hitting a ball thrown by a pitching machine. And there is a pitching machine, whizzing balls to players at home plate who look ready to hit. Except… the batter doesn’t hold a bat. They hold a clicker. As the pitches fly by, they click curve ball, fastball, changeup or slider the second they recognize the pitch. A few sessions, the founder says, and players improve recognition dramatically. And since they aren’t swinging at the pitches, they can watch hundreds of pitches without getting tired.
The second unique station is for vision drills. Where players do drills like following lights on the wall standing on one foot to connect eyesight to their nervous system.
And, as I said, it works.
Focusing on pitch recognition is, objectively, a great idea. It creates separation for young hitters as their competitors don’t train like this.
So, the question is, where’d the idea come from?
A few months back, I reached out to see. The founder walked me through it.
It turns out the initial idea came from an inversion exercise.
Inversion is exactly what it sounds like. When you come across a problem, you invert in. So, instead of asking “how can we create the best baseball players in the world,” you ask “how can we guarantee our players will all be terrible hitters.” When you do that, you think of things like horrible swing mechanics and no core strength and low situational knowledge and… horrendous vision. If you can’t recognize the pitch, you can’t hit it.
Everyone seemed to ignore this, he said, so there was opportunity.
Next, the idea for the non-batting batting cages came from his friend who was a college tennis coach. Leading up to a match, the coach had his players watch a bunch of film clips of their opponent serving. Then, he’d pause the clip right before the serve and ask what type of serve it was. The goal was to pick up clues - nuances in hall the ball was tossed or how the servers body wound up - to see if you could predict a power serve or a spin serve. Hearing this gave our friend the idea for the batting cages with the clickers.
Finally, the vision exercises came from his friend who was a physical therapist and had helped people improve their eyesight after traumatic events like car crashes. The therapist had often talked about how he could improve people’s eyesight past their pre-injury baseline. The insight was that eyesight and hand-eye coordination could improve.
When I asked how all the parts came together, he said he didn’t know. It’d all started from the inversion exercise - something he’d done a bunch as a consultant, his previous job. This helped him realize that a baseball facility focused on pitch recognition could work. He obsessed over it for over a year, he said, and everything eventually just, quote, fell into place.
Then, he referenced the Alchemist — 'When you want something, the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.'
—
Back to ideas.
A good idea is a combination of disparate stuff. A bouliabase of ingredients combined in a way no one else has thought to try. This combination then solves an important problem better than alternatives.
Most of the time, this bouliabaise is made subconsciously.
But, we don’t want to leave this sort of insight to chance. We want it to be reliable. And it can be.
The more I think about that alchemist quote - when you want something, the universe conspires in helping you achieve it - the more I think it’s kinda bullshit.
It’s not the universe that conspires - I think it’s just that your brain starts making better sense of the universe. If it has a problem to solve, it sees everything through the lens of that problem.
I think we can set this up. Build a system to make sure it happens way more often.
The system I’ve been toying with has four parts - Identify, Collect, Chew, Test - and we’ll help you build it, after….. a little smooth jazz.
jazz
Part 1 Identify the Problem - Picking what you want your brain to work on aka Your Brain Loves a Problem
Today’s system will start… with wine.
Have you ever been with a group of friends - maybe camping, maybe at a barbq, maybe at a tailgate - and someone pulls out a bottle of wine but everyone immediately realizes no one has a corkscrew?
The whole gathering turns into a ridiculous SNL macguyver sketch. One guy starts pulling off his shoe because he saw someone do that once, someone else jams their keys into the top of the cork and tries to scoop it out, and another starts taking inventory of all the items at the party, laying out silverware and cell phones and hot dog buns like they’re going to help the astronauts land apollo 13.
And, eventually, you get the wine open.
Your brain loves a problem. It loves having a job. Especially when the boundaries are clear.
The second you need the wine bottle opened the lens through which your brain sees the world changes - everything is a possible solution to that problem. A fork isn’t a fork, it’s a thing that might be wedged inbetween the bottle and the cork to pry it out. Or a tool to drill a hole through the cork so you can pour the wine out directly.
When your brain has a clear problem to solve, it gets creative.
A few weeks back we talked about how our brains speak problem so your marketing language should be problem oriented, not solution oriented - I loved that episode and I’ll pop it in the show notes. Same thing here. If you say - this bottle needs to be opened - your brain springs into action. It speaks problem. If you think - what are some multifunctional tools we could sell to people at a party - your brain can’t get to work. That’s not problem language.
So, the first step of generating ideas is realizing that random ideas aren’t going to happen. You need to give your brain clear problems to work on.
Which means you need to know the problems you face.
Two weeks ago we talked strategy - I’ll pop that ep in the show notes too because these two are intertwined.
We talked about how, if you’re going to be successful, you need to face the actual hardest problem head on.
This can be hard, so here’s an example.
During my brief stint in the med and pharma vc world, I remember a lot of talk talk over curing various types of cancer. Most of these talks started with - “well, obviously the best possible treatment is early detection, but, short of that, what we’re doing is…” then, the pitch.
If you decide you want to focus on early detection to really make a dent, the hardest thing might be getting people an MRI each year. This is expense, tough to sell to customers as it’s not normal behavior for us to be proactive, tough to sell to insurance companies because most patients won’t have cancer, and on and on. That’s your wicked problem. You need a leverage, somewhere, to make it work.
The question you need to feed your brain is, how do we make it possible for people to get an MRI every year?
Once you give your brain that problem - we need to make MRIs cheap or accessible or subsidized or… something… everywhere you look you’ll see examples of those types of businesses and your brain will try and make connections. You’ll see a SaaS and morph it into a possible MRI solution, same with a tool rental business or wework competitor. You’ll watch the great british bakeoff and make a connection there.
If your brain knows the parameters of the problem, and that it’s important. More on the second part later.
And, for the record, I don’t just put work problems into the top of this idea machine. One of my big problems right now is eating healthy lunches. How do I eat healthy lunches when there aren’t healthy leftovers and my achilles is still busted so I can’t drive to the salad place for lunch?
The old brain hasn’t figured that one out just yet, as I record this with a pbj with crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam, the pbj gold standard, by the mic. But it’s trying.
The first part of any great idea is identifying the correspondingly wicked problem it’ll solve. The two are flip sides of the same coin. And you always start with the well defined problem. Without that, you’ll have no meaningful ideas.
Part 2: Collecting - Because entrepreneurs are collectors
About three years ago I decided to take the podcast seriously. This meant I would publish a new episode every week for a year. 52 new episodes. I’d only released them sporadically before.
I ended up going 86 weeks straight with a new episode, then missed a week, then went another 30 or so after that.
About 5 weeks into that first stretch, I started realizing the impact the pod was having on my life. It had nothing to do with listeners - we didn’t really have any back then. The impact was that everything I interacted with was a potential storyline.
If I got a good cold email, I’d save it. If I saw an interesting business, I’d catalog it. Literally everything I saw was through the lens of the pod because I always, at every moment, had a looming deadline. I never had more than 4 or 5 days to write, edit, record, and post a new episode.
So, my brain was constantly dealing with the problem - what’s a useful podcast I can post this week? And everything I saw got twisted into a viable answer.
There’s a quote by Jerry Seinfeld where he’s talking to howard stern about his process. He says that he never stops - that he’s thinking about his act 24/7. About how every second of the day he’s looking for stuff in the world he can use. Stern says that it sounds like a tortured existence but seinfeld says: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.”
All the best entrepreneurs I’ve met are collectors.
They find problems they’re interested in solving, then start collecting everything stuff that might help with those problems.
There are three things you need to nail for the collecting part of your system:
The removal of low quality inputs
A steady flow of high quality inputs
A cataloging tool to make saving and resurfacing dead simple
We start with the removal of the bad, as that’s always the best way to make progress. The best diet advice I’ve ever heard is to just stop eating stuff you know is killing you.
So, remove low quality inputs. You know what you need to do here, but my advice is always to make sure will power isn’t involved. Make all the junk food content is unavailable. Get rid of your social media accounts or give the passwords to an EA and have them message you once a week with any updates. Leave your phone in the car while you work. Get off group chats with people you wouldn’t choose to speak with 1 on 1 each day. Protect your backpack.
The problem with low quality inputs is that it confuses your brain. If you look at instagram 15 times a day, your brain will assume that’s the problem you want it to be working on. It’ll be trying to figure out how to get back with your high school ex, because, hey, you looked at their pictures 10 times today and you didn’t think about MRI machines once. Your brains great at connecting, but not great at knowing your priority list.
Next is the steady flow of inputs. Realizing that your brain will subconsciously prioritize what you put into it, high quality, diverse, unique inputs lead to unique outputs. One Tacklebox founder built a successful D2C business after a conversation with a scientist growing oysters in the long island sound and another built a SaaS business after getting deep into particle physics.
I won’t go too deep on this either, as we can, and probably will, dedicate full podcasts to it. But my favorite approach here is to just look at whatever is considered top 1 or 5% in other markets or disciplines. What’s table stakes for consultants is revolutionary to athletic training.
Finally, capturing and cataloging this information is critical, too. It needs to be wildly easy to catalog and resurface insights as you have them. And they’ll happen when your brains relaxed - when you’re walking your dog or going for a run. I have a notepad in my shower and next to my bed, I use readwise to store all the highlights from my kindle or web articles, I have a dedicated gmail address I use to send myself notes I think of during the day, and I use voice recording constantly to talk through ideas.
I’ll go over my system in more detail in the pod newsletterl, since it isn’t exactly a great audio experience. Go to gettacklebox.beehiiv.com to subscribe.
Be protective of your inputs because they govern your outputs and your brain can’t tell what’s important. Build a system to make sure you capture the connections your brain makes as you go through the day.
Next… chewing.
Chewing - giving your brain space
Chewing is about two things - reminding yourself what’s important and creating space to mull it over. Resurfacing and reflecting.
First, resurfacing.
The goal is to drill home, constantly, what’s important. The problem you’re tasking your brain with solving.
In Nat’s blog, the one I referenced at the beginning, he showed his phones home screen and I’m not sure I’ve ever been blown away by something so simple and useful. He’d used widgets to make sure it only displayed two things - first, a list of the top 5 things he was working on, and, second, a highlight surfaced using readwise. I immediately adopted this practice, then tweaked it a bit.
My phone screen now displays a Notion widget - again, I’ll add it into the newsletter. The widget displays the starred projects and problems I want my brain to be working on.
Right now, it’s two podcast topics, the healthy lunch question, a community for Tacklebox problem, and a gift for my mom for her birthday.
I see these five things every time I open my phone. I’m reminded that they’re the priority.
Below the project list I have a quote surfaced from readwise - something I’ve highlighted that I wanted to remember. This reminds me about the type of content I should be thinking about.
The other part of chewing is reflecting.
Creating time and space to think.
I have a few methods of chewing that work for me. First is a morning journal session of twenty minutes. I look at the projects I’m working on and then write for 20 minutes straight. This is stream of consciousness, but it always spills back to the core problems and how I can mash new stuff I’ve learned together for a unique solution.
The second method is on hold for now, as my achilles heals, but it used to be a run without music. An hour or so of jogging relaxes me and lets my brain start to go - it gives it the space, free of bombardment, to think.
This has been replaced with family time - reading the little guy books weirdly triggers ideas constantly. My brain is relaxed so it starts working properly.
Giving your brain space to work is the hard part for me these days, but there are some things you just can’t speed up. Fill your brain with good inputs, give it a problem to solve, then go do other stuff. Let it work. As Warren Buffet says, “You can’t have a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant,” which, just, what a line.
Anyway, those are the two types of reflection I’d suggest you build in.
Scheduled time to write and actively try to connect the dots, and passive time where you block your brain from new inputs - where you just let it chew on what you’ve pulled in with no other job.
Testing - the uncomfortable bit.
Roughly 90% of the ideas you come up with will be crap and 10% will be life changing. The problem is, we can’t predict which will be which. So, you’ve got to build a system to test them all. To close the feedback loop.
Let’s say our old baseball friend has the flash idea for a baseball academy that focuses on vision.
Great. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it’ll be crap.
The key is testing it. Having the system in place to take what your brain came up with and push on it a bit. We’ve done a lot of work on this sort of test in previous pods, so I won’t spend a ton of time on it, but, our friend might start with a few core assumptions:
First, that high school kids will recognize the value of vision training and pay for it.
And Second, that it’ll actually help them hit markedly better.
You might devise experiments for each. Maybe pre-sell a week long vision training camp and have batting tests before and after.
I tend to think that, for now, the first three steps of this system are most important - Identifying, Collecting, and Chewing. But I wanted to make sure you all didn’t think that was it. As my dad says, a great idea plus a dollar fifty will get you on the subway.
The End
I don’t think this is the last you’ll hear of this system. I’ve been working through it and recognizing the flaws.
I’ve also realized that the systems existence has cut down on a bunch of empty calorie intake - just knowing that my brain treats everything I put in it the same has been… harrowing. And led to me deleting Twitter.
So, what I’d recommend for you is a lightweight, easy implementation.
Here’s how I’d start.
Think of a problem you’d like to solve. Or something interesting you’d like to do, or something useful you’ve been meaning to do.
Maybe the problem you pick is - help the coffee shop in my town make more money so they don’t close.
Great.
Now, get it everywhere. Identify it. Get it on the home screen of your phone, make a card you put on your pillow with it, text it to your spouse every morning and have them ask you about it every night at dinner- make sure your brain knows it’s a priority.
Then, start collecting high quality stuff. Read articles in scientific american and the economist, listen to a few of my pods or a lesser show like how I built this, call your smartest friend and ask what they’re up to. Chat with the owner of the coffee shop, call other coffee shop owners. Collect, collect, collect. The great thing is it doesn’t matter what high quality stuff you ingest - your brain will do something with it.
Then, schedule time the next five mornings to think about it. Twenty minute journal sessions, maybe. Where you start to connect the best stuff you’ve surfaced. Where you start pulling together ideas.
Where you let your brain be a brain.
You can have great ideas. But it won’t happen by accident.