I was at the ICA last night for the opening of a new exhibition by Anish Kapoor. He spoke beforehand about his process as an artist, which was fascinating to hear; he’s a very compelling speaker.
Software builders share with artists share the problem of trying to create something when everything is possible. Anish talked about this issue and how, early in his career, he would not let himself to not work on any object for more than 24 hours. This artificial limit freed him from worrying about creating the perfect object, as well as forcing him to generate a lot of ideas.
Anish was also asked about how he approaches starting a new work, how he first puts chisel to granite, especially in light of so much tradition and history that’s gone on before, and he gave a great response:
Every material, every problem is an old problem. The question is how do you solve it in a new way. -Anish Kapoor
It reminded me of a discussion I had in January on as part of an MIT TechVenture panel for students interested in enterpreneurship. A number of the questions were around how to find that perfect idea for a startup. I proposed that finding an idea for a startups isn’t hard and any student in the room would be able to generate good ideas and, more importantly, good problems, if they sat down and tried. I recommended buying a notebook and simply trying to come up with as many good ideas as they could over the next month, and that they’d be surprised where they ended up.
One Idea Per Page
After the conference, I wanted to prove this to myself, so I did exactly that. I bought a Small Black Notebook
and each night would spend about 15 minutes working on some ideas. I added the constraint of putting one idea on each page. This forced me to focus on getting down one good idea, putting aside the 20 related ones. Like Anish’s rule of not working on something for more than 24 hours, I found this freed me to think more creatively.
The first thing I learned very quickly was that sitting down and trying to come up with ideas was a terrible way to do it. I never actually came up with any new ideas while sitting in front of the notebook. They usually came while I was doing something simple like making coffee, walking to the T, or cleaning my house. However, having a notebook and the habit of writing in it each night meant that when ideas came, whenever they came, I’d make it point to remember them and work through the details that night.
Problems Not Answers
A second pattern that emerged in my notebook was that I was able to come up with a lot of ideas that were answers without an established problem. While, in each case, I could create a problem, the problems were ones that either hadn’t been solved before or weren’t recognized as interesting unsolved problems. These were easy to come up with and were usually the worst ideas. It’s hard enough to get customers to buy your solution; also having to first convince them of the problem is real is a Bad Idea.
The better ones were the ones for which I started with an old question, usually one that had been solved, and tried to solve in a much better way. Often these ended up with ideas for companies that don’t make sense for me to be involved with. While playing squash, for example, I had an interesting idea for sneakers. I’m not interested in learning enough about the sneaker industry to make it real, but I found myself obsessed with it for days, searching the web for information about materials and how to find a good supplier (if you’re looking, East Coast-based startup Panjiva is where to start).
After a month of keeping my notebook, I had convinced myself that it’s not that hard to come up with ideas for startups. My notebook was full and while most of them were junk, half a dozen were interesting and two or three were ideas that would make for good companies. But ideas are the easy part.
Posted by rightcoasttech
