Confidence Classic: The Method to Solve Any Problem Fast with Jeremy Utley

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You know, for most people, a breakthrough is more like a break-in. It catches them off guard. They're like, where did that come from, right? They don't think about being someone who perpetrates breakthroughs. And the point is, you can start to identify what are some things that work for me. And they may not seem like work, and they may not seem efficient, but creativity is rarely efficient. The goal is actually to be effective. And part of effectiveness is understanding what are the tools available to me when I need to break through, and even recognizing when I need to break through.

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Hi and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet my guest this week. Jeremy Utley is a director of executive education at Stanford's d.school and an adjunct professor at Stanford School of Engineering. He's the host of the d.school's widely popular program, Masters of Creativity, and one of the authors of Idea Flow, The Only Business Metric That Matters. That's a bold statement, Jeremy. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to get into this.

All right.

I wanna start with, I remember early on in business, people would say, oh, Heather, you're super creative. You have great ideas. Give us some ideas. And I'd be like, what are you talking? I'm not creative. Are you crazy? I, I'd not see myself in that regard. For the people listening right now that were like me, is it possible in your opinion for anyone to have great creative ideas?

Oh, unquestionably. Absolutely. That's, that's the, that's like the most softball question I've ever gotten in my entire life. Everyone is capable of breakthrough thinking. You know, like the thing that makes breakthrough thinkers different is not their genetics, it's how they think. And the process of thinking is an imminently learnable skill. And that's part of what we try to demystify in the book. As long as creativity is this kind of mystical practice where I gotta go to a Zen retreat center for days in silence to, you know, to wait for the muse, then it remains inaccessible to all of us, but that's, that's not true. And so what we wanna do hopefully is demystify and debunk a bunch of the myths that keep every individual from tapping into the wellspring of creativity that's inside of them.

Okay. But let me jump on something you just said in regards to going to some Zen place. When I was writing my second book, I remember I was hitting a roadblock. I just didn't feel, I was like, not ideas just weren't popping up to me. You know, I was just kind of like stumped. Right. And I thought, and, and I mean, that happens to everybody at times. I'm, and I thought, you know what? I need to get out of here. I need to get out of Miami. I want to go somewhere beautiful and really relaxing. We went to the Breakers in Palm Beach. I took my son and his friend, and within a couple of hours, I was sitting on the beach.

Boom.

Like, I got the idea. Like, everything started flowing to me. So there is something right to that.

Sure. No, unquestionably. My point is less about the value of retreat or withdrawal and more about the everyday accessibility of it, right? To go to a Zen Buddhist center, it's like, I don't even know how I get started, right? But to go on a walk, you know, Joyce Carol Oates says whenever she's stuck in a plot twist in one of her novels, she said, there's always an idea waiting for me on top of the hill behind my house, which is a very poetic way of saying I gotta go for a walk, right? And so recognizing that there are a bunch of strategies that may not feel productive that are incredibly valuable is, is the point. And you don't have to go across the country to breakers to, to have that insight. I was talking with a software developer the other day who's developed internal tools for technology companies, and he was actually working on a Bach concerto in his free time, as software developers might. And he said he was really stuck on this one part, and he had taken his kids to Disneyland, and there was this sandcastle exhibit, and there were these notes playing on these tinny, crappy speakers in the sandcastles. And he said, somehow it reminded me, it just gave me the idea of what if we put a couple of cats in a grand piano? What would that sound like? And he said, that was the breakthrough I needed. And I came back and I wrote the Cats and the Grand Piano piece, and it was, you It transformed this sonnet into what I wanted it to be. But the point is, you, you couldn't possibly think of engineering that moment. You know what you need to do, Brian? Go to the sandcastle exhibit at Disneyland. Right? But the point is, if you think about ultimately what's happening with creativity, creativity and ideas, you know, Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian philosopher, defined creativity in his landmark book, which is like 800 pages long. I only had the chance to read it because I got COVID before the vaccines came out. So I had lots of time in bed, but I, I'm forever thankful that I did because he said creativity is the collision of apparently unrelated frames of reference. And you actually need these collisions of what seems unrelated for, you know, Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about how the idea for Hamilton occurred to him while laying on a pool floaty on vacation. And, you know, but what he did, what I think is actually really exceptional, his wife noticed that. And so what she does is every year when they book a family vacation, she books an extra week for Lin to stay back because she knows that that time to disconnect is so valuable. But what I like there is the practical implications. There are operationalize the thing that stimulates your thinking. You know, I talked to an executive, or you can ask anybody, when's the last time you had an aha moment or a breakthrough, you know, or just you surprised yourself with a thought? And I was talking to a friend the other day. He said, oh, I was actually on the bus. I was talking to a stranger. To which I replied, so do you do that now? And he said, do, do what? And I said, do you talk to strangers on the bus? And he said, why would I? I said, well, you said you want to break through. You just told me about how your last breakthrough was talking to a stranger on the bus. Is that a part of your process now? And you could see his, the far-off look of recognition on his face, like, I thought it was just random. You know, for most people, a breakthrough is more like a break-in. It catches them off guard. They're like, where did that come from, right? They don't think about being someone who perpetrates breakthroughs. And the point is, you can start to identify what are some things that work for me, and they may not seem like work, and they may not seem efficient, but creativity is rarely efficient. The goal is actually to be effective, and part of effectiveness is understanding what are the tools available to me when I need to break through, and even recognizing when I need to break through.

So let's dive into that stranger example. That's the Ben Franklin Junto example that you shared.

Ah, well, so Franklin— so yeah, so that, that's a great example of it. I mean, Ultimately, when we think about creativity, we wrongly think about the output, the iPhone or the, the painting or the new business model, right? GT3 or what, you know, whatever AI, you know, chatbot. We think about the output. Well, the truth is creativity is actually a function of inputs. And so when we think about the need to be creative, we should be attentive to the inputs to our thinking because the stuff that comes into our head is actually, those are the conceptual building blocks we have to work with. So when you take as a given, if I want creative output, what I actually need to be doing is seeking diversity of inputs. One of the ways to do that is through other people, right? Talking to a stranger on the bus. The way Ben Franklin operationalized this was he had what he called his Junto, where every week for 30 years he met with a group of tradesmen. He called it a Leather Aprons Club, a group of people not in his company but outside of his company where they discuss matters of the day, things like Has anyone moved to Philadelphia whom we ought to know? Has anyone's business fallen into disrepute, and for what reason? Are there advances in the sciences that have bearing on our businesses? Right. They'd ask these questions regularly. And if you look at Ben Franklin, you go, the lightning rod, bifocals, the Continental Congress, fire departments, public libraries, all of these, not to mention his, you know, historic literature, all of these radical innovations. If I just had one, you know, if I could just say Continental Congress was my idea, it's like I did it. You know, and he's got all of this range of innovation. If you wonder why, if you wonder why on the output, I would always say, look at the input. And when you see the kind of structure like a junta where weekly meeting with a divergent, diverse set of individuals who influence his thinking, I say, well, it's no wonder he had such diverse output, right? And you know, as a corollary, it's no wonder why so many of us have so little creative output. Because we're dealing with the same input every day. We're meeting the same people, we're going through the same routines, we're incorporating the same information, and then we wonder why there's no fresh output. It's actually look upstream. It's actually an input problem.

Okay. So to operationalize this, for anyone listening, you need to create a different network of people, not the people you're working with every day that you can gather with at least once or twice a month to start brainstorming ideas, talking about what's new and different in your world, and looking at how you can apply that back to what you're doing.

Yeah. And even more fundamentally, it's having a different instinct. Like when I'm stuck, most of the time what we do is we sit down and we think harder. And the design instinct, you know, at the d.school we teach what's called design thinking, which just means for peo— folks who don't consider themselves to be designers, how do you think like a designer thinks, how a designer approaches a problem, right? And the design instinct, or the innovator's instinct, you could say, is instead of thinking harder, as important as thinking is, I don't mean to dis— to disparage that. It's looking up and saying, who can I talk to? Where can I go? What can I try? It's having an instinct towards problems that's not just about focused effort. And inspiration's a really big deal in this equation. My wife's actually a fashion designer. I am a recovering MBA spreadsheet junkie, investment analyst, right? And I meet Michelle and she's telling me how she's got to go to Paris for inspiration. And I'm like, that sounds like a boondoggle for me. That's like a— that's— you just want like macarons, right? But she wants to go to Paris for inspiration because of the textures and the colors and the patterns and all that stuff, right? And she comes back overflowing with ideas, similar to how you came back from Breakers overflowing with a breakthrough, right? Well, to a spreadsheet-wielding recovering MBA, that— I don't know where to put that in the spreadsheet. Where do I put inspiration? Right? And, and yet that attitude to seek inspiration is a deeply creative impulse. And part of what you wanna do when you say operationalize this for people, one thing to do is gather people together like a junto. That's great. The more fundamental thing is, is there a, is there an awareness when I'm solving a problem, I actually need input. Maybe it's in the form of other people. You know what Steve Jobs famously did when the Apple team was stuck designing what he determined to be a very ugly early computer? He got up and went to Macy's and he started walking the appliance aisles until he found a Cuisinart mixer and he bought it and he brought it back to the design team and he said, it's supposed to look like this. Right. And to me, that the amazing thing there is actually his getting up and leaving the team and going to the mall. Right. The instinct that if I'm going to solve this problem, I got to get out of here. People go, I want to think out of the box, but they don't get out of the box because they go, well, I got another meeting in 30 minutes and I got— and then I got another meeting and then I got to work on the spreadsheet. Then I got to get some inbox zero. I go, well, where's the time to go to Macy's and haunt the appliance aisles? And what, where's the awareness that, you know what I need to do? I need to get fresh inspiration.

That reminds me of one of the examples that you shared around an emergency room looking to innovate, and instead of looking at other hospitals, they looked at the racetrack.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When you boil a problem down to its fundamental components, a lot of times interesting things happen there, right? As long as the problem is how do we get patients in and out of here, then where we can look are, are basically where are other places people get patients in and out of? But when you, when you think, well, how do we decrease the amount of time it takes to reset the space? Whoa, you know who does that really well? Southwest Airlines. Let's go there and let's learn about them, right? Who changes equipment quickly? Wow. NASCAR is an interesting place to do this. I was just talking to a CEO of a restaurant company the other day who was telling me about how right now, because of third-party delivery, they got a bunch of DoorDash drivers in the lobby who are kind of clogging up the space. And I said, well, how is the problem being solved elsewhere? And he said, well, you know, Chick-fil-A does this and Olive Garden does this, starts listing. I said, you realize you just listed a bunch of other restaurants, right? And he said, yeah, you, but you said who does this well? I said, I didn't say who solves a restaurant lobby problem well. You said that. I was asking who solves the problem of a crowded space wayfinding? Who solves the problem of a bunch of people arriving momentarily and needing to get where they're going? Could you look at the airport? Could you look at an ER? You know, and so if depending on how you frame a problem, it ends up influencing how you think about the solution. And so a lot of times one of the tactics you can use is let's describe the problem differently, right? There, there's a whole chapter in the book dedicated to ways to describe a problem in a bunch of different ways because sometimes the right frame makes a solution totally obvious that you never would've thought of before.

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I ask you to try to find your passion. One of the big points that you made to me that was eye-opening was the, it's the quantity, not the quality of ideas that counts. Can you jump into that a little bit?

Yeah, that's, it's one of the most misunderstood aspects of creativity is quantity matters way more than quality. In fact, there's a, a researcher at the University of California Davis, Dr. Dean Keith Simonton, who's conducted a longitudinal study across disciplines. And this is well known academically, but it's not well known kind of in the public more broadly that the single greatest variable that affects the quality of your ideas is the quantity of your ideas. Literally, the more ideas you come up with, the better chance you have of coming up with a good one. Basically. And so instead of trying to say, how do I come up with a good idea? What you need to say is, how do I come up with more ideas? And one of the things that's amazing is when you realize that your goal is come up with more, one of the best way to come up with more ideas is to allow yourself to think of bad ideas, actually. So you could say the way to get to good ideas is to generate more bad ideas.

That sounds so counterproductive. And having, you know, been someone who was in corporate America for a very long time, I can tell you this, Jeremy, that is not gonna fly. At a table with a lot of SVPs, if someone says no more bad ideas, people will say you're wasting our time. How do you, if we know that, if your data shows that is the correct strategy, right? And we know that, how do you push through and break through to get people to understand that is the answer?

Well, I think you start to demonstrate organizations are marketplaces and, and good tactics work. And when you start to demonstrate the impact of a different kind of behavior, people start, people go, well, how did you guys come up with that? How did you do that? And if you start to tell the full story, it will really help. A lot of times we have revisionist history when we come up with a breakthrough and we just tell the single thing that worked when the reality is there was a portfolio of experiments that led to this discovery that led to this thing. But then retrospectively, we just talk in that line, right? I mean, and then the other thing is being familiar. I'm privileged to get to study innovation and invention over history. And certainly for the last 13 years I've been teaching at Stanford and seeing how how this plays out in organizations is helpful. You know, I just watched, uh, Sir Jony Ive's memorial tribute to Steve Jobs at Steve Jobs' funeral. And Jony Ive said, you think about Steve Jobs, by the way, as kind of a quintessential example of breakthrough thinking, whether you agree with his management style or personality, whatever. It's hard to disagree that he was responsible for a ton of market disruption and redefining categories, customer delight, et cetera. You go, well, how did he do it? Well, What Sir Jony Ive says is every day Steve would sit down with him and he would, and he said every day Steve would say, hey, Jony, you want to hear a dopey idea? And Jony said most of the time his ideas were pretty dopey. In fact, sometimes they were truly terrible. But every once in a while they take the air out of the room and leave us breathless in wonder, right? As only Sir Jony Ive can say, right? But the point is, Steve Jobs understood fundamentally that if you want to get to delightful, you got to be willing to be dopey. And you could even say dopey is the price of delight, because the truth is, we talked a lot about volume or quantity of ideas. Quality is a function of volume and variation. And a simple way to think about it, not to get too nerdy statistician on you here, but ideas are normally occurring phenomena, or, you know, they're natural phenomena, which means they fall in a normal distribution, right? So you picture a bell curve. That's how ideas fall, which means what? Most of our ideas are very ordinary. A small percentage on the right-hand side of the distribution are extraordinary, and a small percentage on the left-hand side of the distribution are stupid, right? Or dumb. This is the distribution of ideas. It's fine. What, what most people do is they say, I want an asymmetric distribution, or I only want the good stuff. And so what that means is they don't allow themselves to think of the stupid stuff or the bad ideas, the dopey ideas, to use a Steve Jobs-ism. So what they don't realize though is by cutting off one end of the distribution, they actually chop off the other end of the distribution as well. And what they're left with is a bunch of ordinary safe ideas. By refusing to allow themselves to think of dopey ideas, they prevent themselves from thinking of delightful ideas too. And I would argue, by the way, when your colleagues back in the day, as you said, would say, Heather, you're such a creative person, you probably had a lower degree of self-censorship. Than others. And people forget your bad ideas very quickly, right? It's not that we move forward with bad ideas, it's that we get our, give ourselves permission to think of them and share them because it stimulates a, a higher variability conversation. And quality is a function of the variability.

As a manager or leader, one of the things I challenge my team always to do is whenever you come to me with a problem, I want you to bring a laundry list of possible solutions that we can discuss, right? I wanted them in the habit of like, just write down crazy ideas. I just wanna hear 'em. Okay. You might think of something different. Yes. Different, right? Who knows? And then cut to, I was thinking about this when I was reading your book. When I wrote my first book, Confidence Creator, I thought, oh my gosh, what do I name this thing? I took out my whiteboard that I, this is what I did in business every day. And I wrote probably 500 different titles. And then every day I'd wake up and I would challenge myself to cross off 10. This one sucks. I don't like that. I don't like that. And then I would just keep coming back to the room, you know, just a couple times a day and say, no, I don't like that one. And then it ultimately at the end, Confidence Creator was the only one that was left. I'm like, you win. That's it. But I would've never thought of that. That one had I not, you know, sat there for days just writing down whatever crazy idea popped into my head.

No, it's brilliant, Heather. That's brilliant. That is the instinct to generate volume first is an instinct that, that we should all be cultivating. And we actually talk about a daily practice. We call it an idea quota, as you know, where every day, instead of trying to come up with the right answer, air quotes here, because none of us are mathematicians, right? The problems we're trying to solve don't have one right answer. They've got lots of possible answers. And so shifting your goal from what's the right answer to on a daily basis, what are lots of possible answers, is an incredible mental shift. It actually is, you know, you think about if you want to, if you want to build your biceps, you do curls. If you want to build your creative muscle, generate volume. And we call it a daily idea quota. And I mean, I do it every day. I, I wrote a little chatbot kind of script to actually give me a back and forth cuz I like the interplay. But the other day, I mean, we, we live in a house that was built in 1908, just to give you an example, the kind of problems I'm talking about. It's not only new products, new services, and people strongly think of innovation as it's gotta be a market-facing thing. For me, it affects my parenting. We've got this house built in 1908. We tell our girls, we have 4 daughters, tell them all the time, don't run in the house, don't slam the doors. Kind of the standard rules, right? And who listens? Nobody listens. They're slamming doors, they're running around. And the other day, one slammed the door in the other one's face. The other tries to push through and shattered this 114-year-old window. And thank God she's okay. She didn't, you know, cut herself or anything, which is great, but now there's glass everywhere. And importantly to me as the homeowner, there's now an irreplaceable 115-year-old window lying in, you know, shards on the ground. And so then the question, the problem for me is, what do I do? How do I respond? What's my, what's the consequence? And if you think about it, there's kind of a very short list. It's like, okay, let's take away the devices, let's ground them. Did we talk about taking away the devices? Right. Really quickly. Like, that's all we got. And I said to my wife, I said, Michelle, We gotta do an idea quota. And we sat down just like you did with your whiteboard and your, you know, book title ideas, and we generated 10 ideas. And, and by the way, the 10th idea was awesome. And we never would've gotten there if we had just, we're trying to debate the merits of do we ground them or take away their iPads, right? It actually, the first thing is generate more ideas than you think you need, because the truth is there's no empirical evidence that suggests the first ideas that come to our mind is the best. But there's a ton of evidence that's— it's called the Einstellung effect. I like to call it the anti-Einstein effect because the Einstellung effect, you know, documented first in 1942 by Abraham Luchens and more recently by researchers at Oxford, what they determined is when a human being thinks of a solution to a problem, not just a market problem, but a parenting problem, when we think of a solution, two things happen. One, we cease the search for other solutions, and two, we are blinded from seeing better solutions. And this has been demonstrated in a number of innovative studies. But the point is, if you, if you're aware, I have a tendency to fixate on my first idea and there's no evidence, empirical, academic, or otherwise that suggests my first idea is the best idea. Then you start to shift your orientation. Let's go for volume here. What was the cost? The only cost to me and my wife in that moment was the 5 minutes it took us to generate 8 other ideas. What if nothing had happened? We would have lost 5 minutes. And by the way, we were just hemming and hawing in the kitchen anyway, right? It's not like we were doing anything with those 5 minutes, but the potential benefit is astronomical. There's an incredible learning opportunity we were able to capitalize on as a family because Mom and Dad said, let's just spend a couple minutes seeing if we can come up with alternatives.

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All right, let's get into this concept that an idea is actually a connection. And if you can give us some of the examples with Legos Just so visual for me. I love it.

Very simply, if you, you know, I've got a 5-year-old girl and, you know, research suggests that there's not a human being on earth that asks as many questions as a 5-year-old girl. And I can attest to the truth of that statement. And if she asks me, what's an idea? I can't use a definition that requires her to pick up a dictionary. It doesn't work, right? So very simply, and that to me is like a good litmus test for any of my definitions. Can Corey understand it? Okay. If so, then we're in good shape. And what I understand based on my understanding of the underlying kind of neuroscience there is is our brains aren't creating from nothing. It's impossible. Ex nihilo creation, as it were, doesn't happen in our brains. What our brains do when they're creating is they're connecting. They're connecting things that we already know, and maybe we hadn't thought about connecting before, right? And so you could say that an idea, or the, the kind of phenomenon of having experienced an idea, is experiencing a new connection. And that's actually really valuable. It's not just a semantic difference, it's a meaningful difference, because when you realize because a lot of people, you say, hey, come up with an idea, and they freeze in their tracks like, you just asked me to have a tiger, right? Well, no, an idea is not a tiger. An idea is just a connection. And I can look down and connect things, you know. Okay, I've got a remote and I've got Clorox wipes sitting on my desk. Remote and Clorox wipes. Oh, wow. What if you had a self-cleaning remote? That's interesting. What if you could point at something that you wanted to clean and it would clean itself? I'm just, you know, these are ideas, right? What have I done though? You might go, wow, that Stanford genius thought of the point and click. No, I just combined two things, two stupid things sitting on my desk. Right? And the point is, and I, it's just like Lego blocks to use your metaphor. You just bring these two things together. You know, I'll give you an example. I, I work with a company that's in the electric vehicle space, will remain nameless, and they're working on this problem called range anxiety. Okay? So the engineer there, she's telling me how everybody's worried, am I gonna get as far on a charge as, as you say I will? Well. Okay. And so this is a phenomenon known as range anxiety. Many people are familiar with it. Well, she told me the other day she's in a coffee shop and she said, you know, I couldn't help eavesdropping. You know, a couple of folks in military fatigues walk in and all of a sudden I'm like, what are they talking about? And I said, Mary, don't apologize. That's a fantastic creative strategy to, to eavesdrop, right? It's input gathering. So she's eavesdropping and she said, I overheard them talking about how, um, for jet fighters, they have a small fuel tank, so they don't take them back to the base. They do what's known as a mid-air refueling for jet fighters. And she said it it was just like a light bulb went off. And if, you know, you're— you and me and your listeners had this— we had this collective hallucination right now called an idea where you go, wait, range anxiety, mid-air refueling? What if we— and you've just— everybody just put these two Lego pieces together and felt like, well, I'm a genius, right? And you are. You— turns out we have a supercomputer on our shoulders. And the question is, what are the cognitive inputs we're feeding into this connection equation, right? Going back to Kessler's definition of creativity, it's the collision of apparently unrelated frames of reference. And when you realize that the collision or the connection is the creative act, you start to get much more open-minded to accepting inputs, overhearing and eavesdropping at the coffee shop, right? But this notion that an idea is just a connection is an incredibly empowering one because it really, it's, it, it makes ideas not intimidating.

It's so true. And that just reminded me of the story of the admin assistant who was working on the typewriter and having to erase things and erase things and then went to painting class class and was told, don't erase, paint over it. And her light bulb went on in that moment and she applied that back to the typewriter and then she created whiteout. I mean, that was an incredible way to connect those dots, but she would've never operationalized the idea had she not been taking a painting class.

Yeah, it's, I bet that's Bette Nesmith Graham. She's a hero of mine. She's from, she's also a Texan. I'm a Texan, so I've gotta give a shout out to her. But her son, by the way, started the band The Monkees. I don't know if you know that, which is kind of cool. But yeah, an amazing story. And the point is, those, those aren't exceptional. People hear the stories and go, wow, how neat. Well, I go, what's your hobby? And what bearing does your hobby have on the problem you're annoyed by? Bette was annoyed that she spent her days erasing mistakes by this newfangled technology called a typewriter. And every secretary of that era was annoyed, too. But what she had that they didn't have was she was a single mom working side hustles and goofy odd jobs to make ends meet. And when that painter said, "Bet painters don't erase mistakes, they paint over them," she had a cognitive input that very few other secretaries of the day did. I could paint over instead of erase a mistake, right? But all she was doing there, if you get to the— I mean, it's an incredibly exceptional innovation. And I love the story. She worked with her son's high school chemistry teacher to perfect the formula, right? It's really cool. Worked with a local paint store employee to get it just right. But if you abstract a level from the exceptional Bette Nesmith Graham, what you realize is it's a human being who is doing a couple things. One, she's aware of problems in her life that could be solved. We call that keeping a bug list. It's an assignment that's been given at Stanford since the 1960s, long before computer programming entered common parlance. We don't mean write down a list of errors in code. What we mean is is write down a list of the things that bug you. What bothers you? Keep a bug list, right? And Bette Nesmith Graham was intimately familiar with this one thing that bothered her. And then the second thing is look for connections in the world around you as you're interacting with your family and your hobbies. Just entertain the possibility of connections. And true, many connections will be fruitless, but the person who's not looking for a connection doesn't find the connections that are there. That's actually research that's been conducted by Karl Duncker. People who aren't looking for connections don't see them. People are looking for connections. And so the question is like, I guess it's kind of, what do you want? Do you want a bunch of false positives and the real one? Then look for connections and you'll find one, right? Or do you, do you not want to exert the extra energy? And do you say, well, there's a lot of false positives there, so I'm not going to bother? Then you're probably not going to end up with a novel connection. And again, it's a numbers game. Which set of numbers do I wanna be playing with? Do I wanna not look for connections and therefore not waste much time and therefore not have many new ideas? That's great. You get your time back and you don't have many new ideas. Or do you want to look for connections, many of which will be fruitless, many of which feel like a waste of time that ultimately leads to the breakthrough? Downside is it's not nearly as efficient. The upside is it's the only way to break through. And when people realize these are the odds I'm dealing with and you— I'm not voting, you get to choose, I get to choose, but you basically have to choose which distribution do you want to put yourself in? Do you want the delightful ideas? You gotta come up with dopey stuff. Or is your goal to have no dopey? That's fine, but you're probably not gonna get to delightful either.

It's so similar to that whole idea of you have to fail fast. You've gotta try things, test and try and make it a discipline and a practice and accepting of it, and then you'll become more confident in it. And then when you have that breakthrough, through. That's the proof that you need that you are on that right path and keep producing again. Okay. What about the idea of seed and sleep?

The notion there is the subconscious is a phenomenally powerful engine for synthesis and for processing. And it's unique. Our subconscious is unique, especially when we're sleeping in that it's undirected. So the difference between waking and sleeping is when you're waking, you can kind of somewhat be in control of at least your conscious thoughts. When you're sleeping, the reason that there's, you know, that your weird Aunt Thelma shows up at like a train station with your college girlfriend, you know, like why? Because there's no regulation over what the combinations are, right? So it is, it's actually a really interesting example of what we were talking about earlier. Like numbers-wise, it's trying on thousands of combinations, most of which are fruitless and leave you kind of waking up going, huh? Right? But the point is, when you start to recognize that, John Steinbeck once said, there's rarely a problem that isn't resolved once the committee of sleep has convened. Reed Hastings, the founder of PayPal and LinkedIn, said, I never go to sleep without giving my subconscious a problem to work on. Right? And the notion of seeding and sleeping and solving is before you go to bed, think loosely about a problem that you're trying to solve. It could be in your work, it could be in your life, not to like trip yourself into not being able to sleep, but just kind of familiarize yourself with it and then allow yourself in your subconscious the ability to kind of stew on it, marinate on it overnight. Then when you wake up in the morning, write down a few ideas. That's actually the input to an idea quota, where in the morning, after you've kind of prepared your mind for subconscious processing, write down what comes to mind. And they don't have to be great ideas, right? They don't have to be even good ideas. It could just be write down whatever comes to your mind, having having gone through that consideration process a number of times, I can't tell. I mean, for me, I've actually committed myself to the practice of keeping a notebook by my bed, which is incredibly inconvenient and frustrating because, you know, especially right as I'm falling asleep, I do not want to deal with the interruption of writing something down. Right. But you know what I hate more than that is being a hypocrite. And if I tell other people they need to do it, then I've got to do it. That or I got to stop talking about it. And now that this is memorialized in a book forever, I have to be willing to wake up in the middle of the night. So I wake up and the other night I'm dealing with a problem at work. And right as I'm falling asleep, great idea comes. And my thought was, can I just chant it to myself? I'm going to remember this. I don't need to go like, I don't want to rouse myself from sleep. So I kind of chant it to myself a few times. I thought, you know what, this is not— this doesn't count. I'm not doing what I say people should do. So I roll over, I turn on the bedside lamp and I write down my idea. And then I go to sleep, or, you know, I waste 10 minutes because now I got to fall back asleep. In the morning, the first thought that comes to my mind is the idea. And the second thought that comes to my mind is, I knew it was a waste. I didn't need to wake up. I'm so bummed I missed 10 minutes of sleep. You know, I'm muttering to myself as I find my house slippers and I go and I grab the notebook and I start to tear the page out and I look. Heather, it's a totally different idea.

I knew it was going to be from what you taught us in the book because you said you so quickly once you write something down, it's unbelievable how quickly you'll actually forget what that was.

It's amazing. I would have sworn if you had put a lie detector on me, I would have sworn I woke up thinking of the same idea. And the truth is, when I woke up, I had two spectacular solutions to the problem I was thinking about the night before. Not just one, but I only would have had one, which is better than zero. But I only would have had one if I hadn't had the discipline of writing it down in the middle of the night. It's incredible.

And you talk about that it's important at school that you teach this and that you actually talk about the importance of writing down not typing things into your phone.

Why is that? Well, because there's something about the act of writing. I don't know if it's spatial or what, but it encodes the knowledge in a way that I, I would say I find very meaningful. It's not that apps are bad. I mean, that as they say, the faintest pen is stronger than the sharpest memory or something like that. I can't remember the exact gist of it. So writing it down somewhere is better than nowhere. I find notebooks, there's something more tactile, more gratifying about Flipping through a notebook and it jogs memory of where you were when you wrote it down. All it brings all sorts of contextual information back that for whatever reason, a typed out note doesn't. But that being said, typing things out, putting things, you know, Steven Johnson, Dan Pink, many authors talk about having things that they call spark files, files where there's tons of inspiration there and they comb through them on a somewhat regular basis. I think that discipline is wonderful and it's for sure better than nothing. And for most people, you know, we can get into the finer points of like, what's the technology, what's the tool? The simpler point is, do you write ideas down? It's the simplest way you can show reverence for the ideas that grace you at their presence is write them down. And if you don't have a place or 2 or 10 where you write things down, however much you might say you're an ideas gal, you're probably not.

Right. So who is the book Idea Flow for?

Well, you know, if you ask my mom what she'd say, it's for everybody. Because the other day I was talking to her and she's, you know, she's got tons of projects going on. She's not, she's not employed in any full-time capacity, but she said she took issue. She said, this, you say this is a business book, but I'm not a business person, but this book is very useful for me. So the, the mother answer is it's for everybody, which I love and I appreciate. Thank you, Mom, if you hear this. The truth is what we hope to do is equip professionals who've never seen the problems that they're trying to solve in their day-to-day work as fundamentally idea problems. Meaning fundamentally, problems only yield to solutions, and every solution starts as an idea. And if you recognize that the, the greatest way to generate the most successful solutions is to be in the habit of generating lots of solutions, all of a sudden you solve the problem of solving problems for It's so powerful and the stories are so engaging and there's so much tactical direction here, Jeremy.

I love Idea Flow. Where can people find it and where can they find you?

On the web, obviously, ideaflow.design is the book website. You can get information there. There's a free chapter folks can download, How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs. Obviously a couple of my heroes. I've got a website where I blog regularly, uh, jeremylee.design. I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm easy to find online as you found as you were doing your research, and I love hearing questions from people and comments from people. And I, it's a, it's a real joy to get to share these ideas with the world, and I look forward to seeing how it impacts people's lives and work.

Well, I love the book. It's definitely helped me out. I know it's gonna help the listeners. So guys, go grab Idea Flow now. If you are working on any problem, this thing is gonna give you the solutions and the answers. Jeremy, keep up your great work and thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me. Until next week, guys, keep creating your confidence. Dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.