How to generate novel ideas
Today was a good day.
I had sparks of new ideas, all interesting to pursue. I formed connections between thoughts that were previously separate. I deepened my understanding of concepts and enriched them with examples and numbers.
In other words, my knowledge graph got bigger and denser.
So what did I do?
Over the last days and weeks, I collected articles and blog posts related to my Ph.D. research. Today, the first thing I did in the morning was print out 5 of those articles to have a “reading day”.
The articles ranged from a shallow WSJ newspaper article about customer loyalty to a 16-page deep dive into customer unit economics and quantitative approaches to measure product-market fit. In total, I read through 50 pages of content.
What happened was that because these articles were related, some more, some less, the benefits of reading compounded. The first article I read was reading as usual. But while reading the second article, I could build on the first one. While reading the third, I could build on the first and second one. And so forth. When I reached the fourth and fifth articles, my neurons were on fire, forming new connections and coming up with all kinds of ideas.
The spark of ideas was further fostered because the selected articles were written by people having different perspectives on the topics. The WSJ article was written by a journalist, a proxy for the perspective of the general public. Two articles were written by a venture capitalist, representative of the perspective of investors. One article was written by an ex-manager, hence had a more inside-view perspective with a focus on operating a business. The final article was a blog article from an academic which tied many of the concepts to the current state of marketing research.
I do believe that today was a highly productive reading session. Some part of doing a Ph.D. is coming up with novel ideas, and reading is probably the best way to do it. However, as I have learned today, reading does not equal reading. You can actually design your reading strategy to increase your chances of forming new connections and generating a fresh set of ideas. To recap, this is the strategy:
- Collect articles that you want to read.
- Group your articles by category. For example, one category of mine is “related to my research”.
- Once 4-5 articles or so have stacked up in a particular category, you are ready for a “’reading day”:
- Print out the 4-5 articles that you want to read.
- Set aside half a day or so.
- Read one after the other. Highlight & make notes.
After such a reading day, you will have learned new things and will probably have new ideas in mind. You don’t want them to fade away! I suggest that in the second part of your day, sit down and write about what you have learned. Summarize the articles. Write a meta-article that merges the articles together. That is how you produce new knowledge.