One night in 1669, a German chemist named Hennig Brandt was preparing to run a science experiment in his Hamburg basement. 

The amount of effort Hennig had invested to reach this point was nothing short of extraordinary. In fact, he had accumulated no fewer than 1500 gallons of urine inside of his home for what he was about to attempt.

The time and money Hennig had thrown at this experiment was also significant. He had spent all of his first wife’s money on this project by the time she died and was now promptly ripping through his second wife’s fortune. But in Hennig’s mind, his obsession was well spent.

You see, Hennig was an alchemist, and he was convinced that he was about to turn urine into gold.

I’ll spare you the details of the experiment.

Just know that Hennig did in fact discover a brand new luminous substance that night.

No, not gold, phosphorus.

Phosphorus would be involved in countless scientific advancements over the coming centuries so this might seem like one of those accidental success stories, years in the making. But guess what Hennig did with his discovery?

Nothing!

For the next six years, he kept his discovery a secret, and instead kept toiling away at alchemy. Eventually, he would sell his mysterious, shiny substance for what would apparently be worth around $400,000 in today’s dollars. But this is not all that impressive when you consider how much money he had already “invested” and how many years of his life he had dedicated to the invention of the philosopher’s stone.

And of course, Hennig never did manage to create his infinite money glitch because it just so happens that 17th century alchemy is 100% board-certified hogwash. 

It doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how smart you are, or how much money you spend… if your life’s purpose is to turn p*** into gold, the former is all you’ll have to show for it. You can’t win with a brilliantly executed bad idea. You might learn a lot and have fun along the way but if you want to achieve success then eventually you need to work on great ideas.

So, where do great ideas come from, exactly?

After studying how dozens of the world’s greatest ideas were born, I have collected 8 principles that will help you avoid the same fate as poor Hennig…

1/8 Embrace The Stepping Stone Theory Of Greatness

The real tragedy of Hennig Brandt is he actually got a lot right. After all, he was the first person in history to discover phosphorus! His fatal flaw was being too wedded to his original approach. The Universe surprised him with phosphorus and he kept his blinders on and pursued the singular focus of alchemy to the bitter end.

The reaction to these moments of surprise is what sets people apart.

YouTube started as a video-oriented dating site but the founders gave up on this angle within three months after realizing they couldn’t even pay women to upload videos. But after seeing a desire among users to upload other kinds of video, they dropped the dating idea entirely in favor of general purpose sharing.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast)—YouTube’s biggest creator—mostly made gaming videos for his first 5 years on the platform. He stumbled across the hallmark style that has made him so popular today after a random experiment went viral—filming himself counting to 100,000—and then doubling down on that format.

Another 17th century chemist named Robert Boyle also spent years pursuing alchemy, starting his career the same way as Hennig. But when word of fascinating air pressure experiments that were being conducted elsewhere in Europe reached Boyle, he dropped alchemy and went all-in on the work that would lead him to discovering the “pressure–volume relationship” (Boyle’s law). The subsequent research Boyle did would lead him to be known as “the father of chemistry.”

The willingness to shift your initial approach (when a more promising one appears) is the difference between dying with a house full of urine and being the founder of an entire branch of science.

Why?

Life is simply too hard to predict. We struggle to know what the weather or the stock market will look like in two weeks from now, so why would we expect to know how our harebrained schemes will pan out in a year’s time?

The sequence of steps that lead to a great idea tend to only make sense in hindsight and they are too strange and complex for even the smartest of minds to map out in one sitting. Having a great idea is like crossing a river upon stepping stones through a deep fog. Each next stone is only revealed after the previous one has been taken.

Your initial plan is your best attempt to guess where all the stones are in advance. You are almost certainly wrong but that’s OK because the only way to find the right path is to start stepping. A wrong idea is an excellent way to start moving, collect experience, and put yourself on the path upon which a great idea can be discovered. The lethal mistake is inflexibility.

There is data to support the stepping stone theory of greatness. An internal analysis of the top 100 startups that went through the Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator (including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Dropbox) found that “at least 70% of them had their ideas organically rather than by sitting down and explicitly trying to think of a startup idea.” In other words, most winning ideas are found in the flow of doing something else.

Of the startups that sat down to deliberately come up with an idea, most altered their approach as they came into contact with reality. “The problem,” the analysis concluded, “is that when people sit down and try to think of startup ideas, they tend to think of bad ones.”

Once you’ve set off in an interesting direction, everything hinges on how you respond to surprises when they appear. You’ll often have to shift direction multiple times before you finally get the big “aha!”—the destination you never could have foresaw when you first set off on your quest.

So that’s principle #1: great ideas are discovered more often than they are planned.

Now let’s say you have an open mind and you’re ready to wander down surprising avenues. Is there anything we can do to hasten their arrival?

Yes…

2/8 Activate Deep Research Mode

As we’ve established in a previous edition, the most valuable ideas are both new and useful.

“New” doesn’t have to be a giant leap. You usually just have to do something in a way that it’s never quite been done before. The writer Ryan Holiday, for instance, has made a career out of modernizing stoicism. The subject matter is ancient but Ryan’s voice proved to be a new and valuable twist. The iPhone was still a phone and Beyonce’s country album is still music. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to add some rubber.

That being said, finding new and valuable twists is still hard.

One way to find them is to go incredibly deep on a single subject with an open mind.

In 2017, Kurt House was growing increasingly dissatisfied with his private equity job. So, as he tells it, “I did a deep dive on battery chemistry with the original motivation of potentially doing a startup in cathode materials.”

Kurt also roped his colleague and friend Josh Goldman into the project. “We spent six months thinking this through,” Kurt continues, “and we came out the other end with observations that we really didn't expect or didn't even intend to consider.”

As Kurt and Josh dived deeper into the topic of batteries, they stumbled across the stark realization that the world was going to run out of the critical minerals needed to build batteries in the first place! This was clearly a much bigger problem—and one that the industry was ignoring.

Unlike Hennig, they abandoned their initial idea and founded a company that uses AI to discover hidden mineral mines, with the goal of providing humanity with all of the critical minerals it needs in the coming decades. Last year they discovered the world’s largest copper mine in over a decade and today KoBold is worth over a billion dollars—not bad for an idea that started as a six month research project.

Deep research doesn’t just generate great ideas in academic realms.

The three-time Best Actor Academy Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis is famed for the meticulous research he does to prepare for his movies. To adopt the role of Abraham Lincoln, he studied biographies, photographs, and the former President’s own writing for an entire year. One dimension that sets Day-Lewis’s Lincoln apart from previous renditions is his high-pitched voice, a true to life fact discovered during the research process.

Or take the world of sport, where baseball was revolutionized by a security guard who spent years studying and compiling player statistics—paving the way for sabermetrics (popularized in the movie, Moneyball).

Deep research takes you to the frontiers of what’s known (to the outermost and best hidden stepping stones), giving you the vantage point necessary to spot what should come next.

3/8 Bias For Random

Another effective technique is to go wide—to travel far away from your area of expertise.

After working on the composition for the Tony award winning musical In The Heights for seven years, Lin-Manuel Miranda needed a break. He traveled to a Mexican beach resort and says he “happened to pick up this amazing biography about Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow” for some light vacation reading.

“The moment my brain got a moment’s rest,” Miranda said, “Hamilton walked into it.” At first, it was just a single song that dawned on Miranda, but over the coming years this spark would evolve into a mixtape of several musical numbers and eventually the full scale $1,000,000,000 Broadway hit.

Who’d have thought such an idea was hiding in a historical American biography?

No one. It came as a surprise, which as it’s hopefully becoming clear, most great ideas do.

Another great idea brought about by randomness is the original Nike trainer which can be traced back to a Japanese executive who was inspired by the suction cups on an octopus in a sushi restaurant. Then there’s Tinder’s swiping motion that was inspired by a random deck of cards sitting on a software engineer’s desk.

New and useful ideas can be found by making unexpected bridges between two islands that have never before been connected. One way to discover these connections is to subject yourself to random inputs far outside the boundaries of what you’re usually exposed to.

Yes this is your permission to goof off and engage with novel experiences!

4/8 Capture, Revisit, and Compile Interesting Thoughts 

During a 2004 trip to London, the Hollywood filmmaker Guillermo del Toro found himself sprinting after a taxi in a stomach-lurching panic. When he realized he wouldn’t catch up, he hailed another taxi, yelling “Follow that cab!”

Del Toro ultimately lost the taxi’s trail, along with a notebook that he’d left in the back seat. The notebook contained four years of "doodles, ideas, drawings and plot bits.” 

Del Toro is known for creating these journals, which he describes as an eclectic “mail order catalog of ideas.” While the notes may seem disjointed at first, there comes a day when an entire movie can crystallize as he reads back over the fragments.

By some miracle, the taxi driver was able to track Del Toro down two days later and return the notebook. Del Toro tipped the driver almost $1000, an amount easily justified when you consider that the film inspired by those notes, Pan’s Labyrinth, would earn over $83 million at the box office on a $19 million budget, win three Academy Awards, and become the most critically acclaimed film of the 2000s.

This habit of taking and reviewing notes has proven to be a wellspring of great ideas for many individuals. As we’ve detailed before, Aaron Sorkin assembled A Few Good Men from years of notes on cocktail napkins that he wrote while bartending in a Broadway theatre.

Meanwhile, author and founder Steven Johnson has argued that the theory of evolution was a result of Charles Darwin keeping years of detailed notebooks and periodically reviewing them.

Sometimes, you will discover something interesting along your journey but not know what to do with it. The answer is to make a note. Eventually, as you review your notes, your random collection of interesting ideas may compile into something much grander than a single piece ever could’ve indicated.

Collect what’s interesting and then wait for connections to spark between the dots.

5/8 Double-Click On The Unexpected

Sometimes you’ll just be minding your own business and a stepping stone will magically appear in front of you. Often you’ll have no idea where it leads or if it really even is a stepping stone—but there will be something special about it that captures your attention, perhaps something you can’t even put your finger on.

In 1981, Howard Schultz encountered one such stepping stone. At the time, he was working as a salesman for a Swedish homeware company called Hammarplast. But then he noticed something strange. A little retailer in Seattle—Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice—was placing unusually large orders for a simple plastic cone drip coffee maker from Hammarplast. This “Starbucks” place was buying quantities greater than Macy’s even though it had only four small stores!

Schultz didn’t just shrug off this peculiarity, he pounced on it, booking a flight from New York to Seattle to see what was happening in person. After spending a whole year nurturing the relationship, the cofounders finally allowed Schultz to work there.

As one of his first orders of business, Schultz booked a trip to Milan to learn more about Italian coffee culture. That’s when another peculiarity caught his attention: an espresso bar. Schultz wandered inside and quickly became convinced Starbucks should go all-in on serving fresh espresso drinks like the Italians.

When the cofounders refused, he left to start his own coffee company, eventually buying Starbucks outright years later, growing it from the half-dozen stores it had then into the global colossus we sip from today.

Imagine if Schultz had never pulled on the peculiar threads of Starbucks’ large order quantities and Milan’s espresso bars? The word “Starbucks” would probably mean nothing to us today (“What’s that? A new cryptocurrency?”). Not every head-tilting encounter is an opportunity of a lifetime in disguise. But some of them are! This explains why curiosity and luck go hand in hand.

One of wildest examples of double-clicking I found might be Stephenie Meyer.

In 2003, Meyer awoke from a vivid dream about a sparkly vampire and a teenage girl lying in a meadow. The details felt so compelling that she rushed to write them down. Over the coming weeks, these characters would keep revisiting her imagination at night, and she continued to write down what she saw and heard as an exercise in curiosity. Meyer never had any intention of writing a book, but after three months of pulling on the threads of her imagination, she had stumbled into a draft of the first Twilight novel.

When you see something strange or interesting, get hyper-curious and double-click.

6/8 Rethink Everything After An Inflection

Stepping stones are not distributed evenly. They are more likely to surface during special windows of time.

Most people know Dick Fosbury transformed Olympic high jumping when he introduced his technique of going over the bar backwards-first instead of using the traditional straddle technique. 

By the following Olympics, the majority of competitors had copied his technique that most viewed initially as ridiculous.

But few know how Fosbury got the bright idea to leap backwards in the first place.

If Fosbury had attempted his flop just a few years prior, he would have broken his neck. That’s because the pits that high jumpers used were made out of sawdust and wood chips. But as Fosbury was training, the sport was transitioning to deep foam matting.

This softer landing is what made it possible for someone to attempt the flop. 

When there is a shift or an inflection point in an industry, a brief but powerful timeframe opens up where great new ideas are born.

Twitter, Uber, and Instagram were all released within two years of the 3G iPhone in 2008 because 3G was necessary for loading text, images, and GPS, on the go. Musically.ly (now TikTok) came two years after the release of the 4G iPhone, necessary for streaming video on the go. There’s an argument to be made that 5G is paving the way for cloud based gaming apps and AR experiences.

If you see a major shift take place in an industry, that is the time to rethink everything from scratch and consider the implications of the inflection.

7/8 Prepare Your Mind

One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered through researching the origins of the world’s greatest ideas is that the people who have them all share one thing in common.

Take Maor Shlomo for instance.

Shlomo recently sold his AI coding app, Base44, to Wix for $80 million.

The company was six months old at the time of the sale. Shlomo didn’t raise a single dollar of investor capital and he was the only founder working on the business.

How is it possible to achieve eighty million dollars of success that fast and without help?

Answer: a prepared mind.

Shlomo already had 9 years of experience building a company and coding.

Without exception, all of the people behind the great ideas that I’ve researched had years of experience in an industry related to their idea. 

Sometimes a person had years of experience in one industry that they then used as an “outsider” to disrupt an unrelated industry (e.g. the fusion of data science and sport), but it wouldn’t have been possible without years of knowledge and skill acquisition in at least one domain that the person cross-pollinated with another.

While it’s true that great ideas are discovered, they are almost always discovered by a prepared mind.

For the most part this is just because you need skills to actually exploit an idea.

If I could travel back in time to the early 2000s to give young Lewis the idea for the iPhone, which is when Apple started development on the project, it would be of no use to us. I would have to travel back to the early 90s and convince myself to establish all of the necessary skills, knowledge, and resources required to bring such an idea to life (never mind the added complication that young Lewis wasn’t yet born).

Great ideas are often brought to life by prepared minds and skilled hands that are open to surprise. This means we need to learn valuable skills prior to knowing precisely how we’ll use them. 

8/8 Do Nothing 

Notice how Lin-Manuel Miranda was lying on a beach when he had his great idea and Stephenie Meyers was asleep!

The most direct answer to where great ideas come from is our subconscious mind.

But we often need to be resting or idle for the subconscious mind to do its thing.

In the early 1900s, the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré was wrestling with a problem related to “function theory” for months. When he finally acknowledged that his brain wasn’t braining, Poincaré gave up to go on vacation.

At one point during his travels, a bus pulled up, and as Poincaré later wrote, “at the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it.” The idea turned out to be the precise solution to his problem.

Sometimes a great idea will not reveal itself to you until you fully unplug and check out. Give yourself the permission to be bored, do nothing, and rest.

The Engine Of Great Ideas

If I could distill all of this down to a single approach, it would be to cycle endlessly between rigor and release.

The “rigor” involves skill building, deep knowledge acquisition, and the dutiful collection of interesting thoughts and tidbits.

The “release” part is being receptive to surprise, open to shifting your approach, exposing yourself to random inputs, and embracing downtime.

If you alternate between these two extremes, there’s no doubt you’ll arrive somewhere interesting.

Just where that somewhere will be is unknowable.

But you can’t have magic without mystery.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky’s monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest edition, Scott explores the implications of AI freeing up our time and attention along with how the sway of “branding” is evolving.

• Looking for a way to elevate your creative process using good ol’ fashioned Pen and (80lb Via Vellum Cool White) Paper? Replenish your supply of Action Method notebooks and journals—the essential toolkit that thousands of creatives rely on to work with a bias toward action.

• Need some help thinking through how to implement AI into your daily workflows? Learn more about our AI workflow strategy sessions. One reader shared an unsolicited testimonial, “my 45 minutes with you just now saved me about 50 hours of work!“

• Want an easier way to connect with us and the Action Digest readership? We’re thinking about starting a group (in the spirit of the stepping stones theory of greatness… details TBD)—if you’d be interested in joining then reply to this email/post with “count me in” or something similar :)

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