Beyond Smart

I love the drive behind this article from Graham. Having new ideas, synthesizing existing information into something fundamentally new or different, even if just in your own head, is a delightful thing. I agree with his assertion that intelligence and ideation are independent.

Pretty routinely I get asked about the breadth of topics I read about, and write about in this newsletter, and where I find the time and in part the motivation. I have a strong opinion that new ideas come from combining disparate topics and creating new concepts from the interplay. I've seem it happen many times. I think this is particularly important in technology.

I liked this part at the end of Graham's essay.

One of the most surprising ingredients in having new ideas is writing ability. There's a class of new ideas that are best discovered by writing essays and books. And that "by" is deliberate: you don't think of the ideas first, and then merely write them down. There is a kind of thinking that one does by writing, and if you're clumsy at writing, or don't enjoy doing it, that will get in your way if you try to do this kind of thinking.

Writing your thoughts is so important. It is easy to believe you have found some clarity in a stream-of-conscious dialog or some list of bullets, but the act of forming sentences and paragraphs with nouns and verbs is a refining process that filters, clarifies, and forces cohesion needed to for something new.