Accidental Genius: How To Think

http://www.dextronet.com/blog/2011/07/accidental-genius-summary/

by jirinovotny • 15 years ago

175 46 15 years ago

This is my favorite read all week. Thank you! As an "idea writer" with plenty of notebooks around at all times to capture thought fairies, this is a freakin beautiful way to extend that practice and take it to many levels I hadn't even thought about. I will buy this book as thanks to the author and poster- Cheers-

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

I'm going to disagree that 'how to think' should be an alternate title. 'Accidental Genius' is exactly what it is... You just pour out your thoughts like monkeys at typewriters, hoping to get something good. Now, since we're a little better at typing than monkeys, chances are that you'll happen across some nuggets. But this should never be confused with actual logic which can be used on command to get results consistently, rather than randomly.

For a fiction writer, the difference may be negligible. For a rocket scientist, it's a matter of life and death. Literally.

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

I think you are underestimating how much accidental thinking goes into the work of things like science. And providing a little bit of a strawman. I don't think the author of the book nor the reviewer intends this to replace "logical thinking" rather to support it for some people.

Sure there is a lot of logical thinking involved but some of the real insights where not based on the logical progression of thought in fact they where based on breaking them. Exactly to deliver insights outside the realm of the logical axioms.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

You're talking about the creative aspect of science. For that aspect, this method may very well work. However, for turning that idea into an actual process or product, it won't work well at all.

Randomness is not as valuable as logic when working towards a specific end. That is, if you already know the beginning and the end, using randomness to find the path between them is probably the slowest and least likely to bring results.

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

Hmm I am not sure what to think about this.

It is my experience that "The art of thinking" comes in many shapes.

Some people are very clear in their thinking others are very messy. Some people need to speak rather than think, some people need to think rather than speak. Some people need to Doodle, some do 100 ideas in 10 minutes other do 10 ideas in 100 minutes.

I appreciate the purpose and the methods of the book. I am sure it's a fantastic way... for some people.

It's not necessarily for everyone.

mcav• 15 years ago

Nothing's for everyone. No technique, workflow, programming language, business methodology, or idea applies to everybody.

No post on HN will ever resonate with everyone. Take that as a given, because every post could just as well have a disclaimer like this.

true_religion3• 15 years ago

A lack of resonance doesn't prevent some concepts from being universal.

You're taking it too far by saying that no concepts are universally applicable to human beings.

If I made a post saying "We need to eat to live a healthy life", would that not be a universal truth? If it doesn't resonate with some people (e.g. some quibble: "We can puree our food and drink it" or "intravenous injection works for me", and ignore the serious disadvantages of both choices) is the scientific truth of "we need to eat to live a healthy life" not true?

Relativism to an extreme degree is next to nihilism.

dsmithn• 15 years ago

I believe his comment is justified for this particular article because the author specifically says, "The results are almost always incredible...And it works for everyone. Even if you hated school writing assignments, you will love Freewriting."

joeyespo• 15 years ago

I completely agree. First started thinking this way after listening to Feynman talk about his discovery of how people think very differently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y#t=146s

He does a great job of communicating this, despite our interpretive differences. (Though perhaps it's just very well spoken for my interpretation and just the opposite for someone else out there.)

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

I could listen to Feynman forever.

He always leave me humble and exited at the same time.

His way of thinking about things are so rare even among the contemporary "great thinkers". He treats everything as an experiment and show what it really mean to be a careful thinker.

andrewflnr3• 15 years ago

Similar techniques have worked in the past for me, but I always wind up with a bunch of paper or computer text that I have no idea where to put. How do you organize all the data without interfering in its creation? Ideally, I'd like a solution that also incorporates all the little inspiration bits I get at various times, and other thoughts I'd like to keep.

jirinovotny• 15 years ago

Check the part "Build an Inventory of Thoughts". It talks exactly about that.

andrewflnr3• 15 years ago

Right, but it didn't give a lot of practical details. Probably the actual book has more; I guess I shouldn't complain because I'm too cheap to actually buy it.

freshfey2• 15 years ago

I suggest Evernote. Create a notebook called thoughts and a note for every topic you want to write. Afterwards it's more or less organized (in the cloud) + searchable.

andrewflnr3• 15 years ago

I've toyed with it, but never really gone for it. I think I'll give it a real shot this time. Thanks.

geni008• 15 years ago

This is a pretty awesome tool. Thank you for suggesting this. It'll be really useful for me!

Detrus2• 15 years ago

http://750words.com/ is a cute tool for the writing exercises. I'm not a writer, just checked it out for a few days and didn't read the Accidental Genius book.

I got bored the second day. I didn't write down anything interesting, my free writing was so boring I didn't bother to read it after. Maybe I need more guidance like this book provides. Typically I write things down when I get an idea during thinking, not to do a writing exercise.

filiwickers• 15 years ago

That site is great! (And the original blog post)

Checked out the post and followed with 20 minutes of Freewriting on 750words.

I don't think it should all be interesting. Actually that is the point. If you write down enough stuff most of it will be crap, just like most ideas. But eventually something good will come out. Also, if nothing good comes out- at least you have gotten better at writing and clarity of thought.

Detrus2• 15 years ago

Well, reading over my routine of writing down only interesting ideas, many of the ideas are still interesting. Reading over my freewriting, it's just a lot of "let me think of what to say, oh I bought a MacBook and played a game." I wouldn't even bother writing down an idea during the exercise, I tried once but I was tired by then and couldn't flesh it out.

That site has some cute charts that try to measure your mental state, I was curious to see what they'd show. I lasted 7 days, at the end charts got way off and I gave up.

genieyclo• 15 years ago

also see http://quietwrite.com

ForrestN• 15 years ago

It would be interesting to try this strategy with Workflowy. They talk about it being a way to keep your brain online or whatever, and it certainly allows for fast dumping of ideas. The question is whether its structure will cause you to want to edit while you're writing. You could just produce a ton of discreet notes as new lines, and then rearrange them later.

da5e• 15 years ago

The New Diary by Christine Rainer is another good book on exploring through writing. It has many of the same techniques. The freewriting technique not only gives you ideas, but sometimes a sense of peace about what worries you.

ulisesroche• 15 years ago

This kind of stuff is really important. I've done this for about a year now, read about it somewhere, called them Morning Pages, or something like that. It's really a daily brain dump, and I use Evernote to have the entries easily searchable and taggable. I also write right before I go to sleep and for lack of a better name, called them Evening Pages.

Once I got into the habit of doing them, I saw three other benefits: 1) I no longer needed stupid to-do lists, 2) Because I did them right when I woke up, before I was conscious enough to be self-conscious, I was brutally honest with myself, and got rid of my obnoxious depression, and 3) The daily practice really improved my writing.

Journaling really is a better form of meditation. I wish I'd gotten into the habit sooner.

chubot3• 15 years ago

Yeah, I totally thought of "morning pages"! I came across that idea a couple years ago.

I have always written a lot, but I never did it as religiously as morning pages. I wrote a wiki in 2004 where I keep all my thoughts/notes -- it's about 1000 wiki pages now (probably 2000 without deletions). Before that I kept a diary but it wasn't really for "ideas", more "complaints" :)

Right now I feel like I have enough ideas and it's about execution... but I do think there is something valid to the approach.

It's also similar to what happens when you write down your dreams first thing in the morning (or even during the night if you wake up after them). I tried this when I was 15. My mind was blown.

I started remembering 7 or 8 dreams a night. I would go to sleep for 50 minutes and it would feel like I experienced 8 hours of time in my dream. It was really disorienting (and interesting). I don't remember but I think it took about 2 weeks of writing before that happened.

So this is another example of writing changing your brain. Your brain wants an audience (or more accurately, your subconscious does, and the subconscious is where ideas are generated). If you write down your dreams, you'll start having/remembering more of them. If you write down more ideas, your brain will generate more of them and follow more associations.

malingo• 15 years ago

I had a similar experience writing a retroactive trip journal after a few weeks through central Europe. In the month after returning home, I'd spend at least 30 minutes (sometimes an hour or more) late at night just brain-dumping everything I remembered from the trip in chronological order. I deliberately wrote stream-of-consciousness style, in the dark, eyes closed, and I was astounded at the level of detail recall I could achieve--not only minute-by-minute, inch-by-inch recollection of events and places, but in slow motion (if I so chose, replayed any number of times), allowing me to re-live the entire trip.

Deliberately plunging my brain back into the places and situations I'd been in recreated the super-stimulated "traveling brain" state. I think the act of reliving and reinforcing the memories made them even more vivid now several years later than they otherwise would have been.

I believe the key aspects of the process were both the deliberate memory churning and the typing--the physical transfer of the brain activity. Maybe my ~80 WPM typing speed happened to be a good match/governor for my recall rate, too.

Now this wouldn't be at all practical on a day-to-day basis since day-to-day life details are so repetitive, but I could for sure see the benefits of picking some out of the ordinary event or encounter and drilling back through it to discover what else your brain has to offer. I can also see the potential in trying it for a known future event for planning purposes.

freshfey2• 15 years ago

Does it matter whether you actually write in a notebook or on the computer? Because in the book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" the author mentions morning pages as well, so I did it a few times, but it felt a little tiring on my eyes on the computer so I continued in a notebook (and I hate writing in a notebook; I'm very slow.).

Troll_Whisperer• 15 years ago

I also used to keep a dream journal; mine was for the purpose of lucid dreaming. Morning pages really make me curious. I saw them recommended in the Pragmatic Programmer's book Refactor your Wetware. Have you found that your wiki lead to measurable improvements in other parts of your life?

blue12• 15 years ago

> read about it somewhere, called them Morning Pages, or something like that

AFAIK, it comes from Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way".

rluhar• 15 years ago

I have not read the book mentioned in the op, but I tend to use a somewhat similar technique to declutter my mind. When focusing on a particular problem, or topic I tend to scribble (or doodle) in my notebook without any constraints.

Once I have a good enough start point, I try and write down my thoughts in an email to (a possibly imaginary) a colleague who may be interested in what I have to say. The very fact that I now have an audience acts like a filter and helps me get to the crux of my idea very quickly. Writing for an audience also makes you evaluate what ideas may be relevant and what irrelevant.

Its even better if you have somebody you can use as a soundboard to talk about your ideas. Of course, thats not always possible (and is very obnoxious!), so the email method works better for me.

dpatru• 15 years ago

One good habit of thought not mentioned in the article is thinking in analogies. Comparison and contrast seem to be fundamental brain operations. Smart people express themselves in analogies, especially parables/stories. Always be thinking, "What is this like?" or "What does this remind me of?"

wallflower• 15 years ago

If you are interested in FreeWriting, I highly recommend Keith Johnstone's "Impro"

In it he talks about doing a writing exercise while counting down from 100 simultaneously. That really preoccupies the limiting consciousness and lets stuff come out.

DharmaSoldat• 15 years ago

I tried a bit of this just a moment ago. Came up with the answer to a problem I've been thinking about for some time now. Additionally I thought of some great ideas for weekend projects.

I'm suitably impressed to keep trying it out to see what else I can do with it, if not to experiment a little - it is very much like monkeys at typewriters.

Anyone else feel this is like "intellectual improv"?

yojimbo311• 15 years ago

I may have missed something, but this doesn't feel like a review, it feels like he's rehashed and summarized every point in the book without adding any original content, beyond how he's been using the techniques. A nice glowing review with some choice summaries would have been plenty to get me to dig deeper and purchase the original book. After reading this though, I feel I've pretty much gotten everything I could have from the book and have no desire to actually purchase it, beyond supporting the original author. I enjoyed the material, and I think it's going to be really useful going forward, but maybe a Spoiler Alert warning would have been appropriate.

keithpeter• 15 years ago

Yup, I pray quietly that I don't get 'reviews' like this when I finally get some writing done. Useful techniques, but widely used already. See Anne Lamott 'Bird by Bird' and the (real) reviews of that book.

jc123• 15 years ago

Author intended to write a 'summary': I decided to write a detailed summary of it. Haven't read the whole summary yet, but it looks well done, and agree that it could work against the author's PS: Go get the book.

astrofinch• 15 years ago

Speaking for myself, I solve hard math and computer science problems best by explaining my thinking aloud slowly and carefully to someone I want to impress but I know won't be judgmental if I screw up.

blue12• 15 years ago

"One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor." -- Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike

Accidental Genius: How To Think

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