I’ve had a thought rolling around in my head for a couple days now.
This is part of the Idea Supply Chain that I’m really curious about.
How do you source ideas without actively searching for them?
Let’s dig a bit deeper into my thought process here. Basically, everything we do online has some base level of discoverability, by distribution algorithm, crawlers, etc. The more you focus on creating something that can be easily discovered, the less you focus internally on you. There are a million how-to articles that can help you solve almost any problem. Some of them might even work.
But so much of the context gets removed in favor of “creating helpful content”. Check out Google’s guidelines. It talks a lot about “information, research, analysis”, etc.
It doesn’t talk about pulling feelings out, sharing pain, expressing ideas, etc. There’s so much more to it.
That’s something I’m trying to embrace. I signed up for Foster’s Season 4: A More Beautiful Question, because I felt a sense of resonance with that piece on Frequently Unanswered Questions (FUQs). I think that’s a beautiful way to express the concept, because there are all sorts of things we are looking for that there aren’t simple answers for. It’s not something you can pull a snippet off of WikiHow to answer.
These are the deeper questions. The more I study ideas, the more I think we’ve got a chance to break free from conventional ways of thinking, experiment with social norms, and create lives that are uniquely ours.
Here’s the problem:
we can only look for something if we know it exists.
And that leads to the biggest problem with Google, in my opinion:
Google assumes an answer exists
There’s a lot of black and white thinking here. This or that. 100% or 0%.
But reality is grey.
It’s really hard to have answers. In fact, any answer we have stops us from finding a better answer. If it’s a solved problem, we stop trying to solve it.
But what if it’s not really solved?
All we’ve done is ensured it will rear its ugly head at the most inopportune time.
That’s why I’ve been replacing solutions with ideas.
So what’s an idea?
That’s a question I’ve been playing with. Here’s my current favorite definition:
an idea is a thought that escapes the mind and touches reality by being shared.
An idea is different than a thought. A thought is an internal process and is usually all tied into other thoughts that we aren’t even aware of. Don’t believe me?
Try to express a thought to someone and have them understand it the first time.
It’s really hard. That’s why I’m studying how to use writing, video, conversations, etc to pull them out of my head into standalone ideas.
I want to see how my thoughts can change reality. But I’ve got to share them as ideas.
Ideas change the world.
I was listening to a podcast that talked about how big changes in communication typically result in bad outcomes in the immediate aftermath, but good outcomes in the long run. The invention of the printing press led to the 30 Years’ War.
When ideas get shared broadly, they tend to bounce around and have all sorts of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects.
Makes it hard for people in power to keep that power when the masses realize things could be different.
Most religions don’t offer a ton of flexibility, so when the churches get tied to states, states don’t like different ideas coming in to disrupt things.
Using Shibboleths
Human language is inexact. Words have all sorts of different meanings that can be based in history, culture, experience, and beliefs. I recently uncovered the idea of shibboleths, which I’d heard about, but didn’t understand. Apparently, the concept is based in the Bible, where the pronunciation of shibboleth (a river or stream in Hebrew) was used to determine which area a person was from. That allowed them to distinguish between friend and foe, because different dialects didn’t have the same diphthongs as part of their language.
This is something that has become fascinating to me online. People use different words, different concepts to talk to specific groups of people. But the weird thing is that they don’t necessarily need to believe in the things that they say. It’s not like something that is rooted in language and physical origins, it’s more like knowing the password to get into a secret club. It might get you in, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you are in the club.
That means you have to work extra hard to pull meaning from ideas on the internet. You need to run them through a filter to extract the shibboleths from the text. I view it almost as tagging the text to speak to the algorithm and have the algorithm distribute it to the right group of people.
But most people use shibboleths the opposite way: they filter the people based on the shibboleths used. Are they in my tribe or not?
Most people aren’t looking for ideas. They are looking for people.
I played the Shibboleth game at one point, because I was looking for people to connect with. And what I realized is that the people who knew how to play the Shibboleth game were often exploiting the other players.
When you know what you need to say in order to draw people in you have power. And in the words of Lord Acton,
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So that’s when I switched to filtering on ideas. That’s a lot harder. It requires more effort, because you have to vet the ideas among different people, then look for discrepancies between their ideas. When you see someone saying one thing and doing something else, or saying things like “in order to succeed, you need to do X”, the easiest thing you can do is find someone successful who didn’t do X.
That’s when you realize that all sorts of people love to speak in absolutes, because those are the Shibboleths they are using. That’s what they use to pull in the right audience, usually for whatever they are selling.
Nuance doesn’t sell on the internet.
And that’s the paradox of discoverability: in order to be discovered by people, you need to wrap your ideas in Shibboleths, because that’s what most people are looking for. But the most valuable ideas are Shibboleth-free, because those distort the ideas being shared.
Organic, Free-range Ideas
I’m always interested in how people change their minds about things. This MoZ episode was a good discussion around that.
If you want a good discussion on Shibboleths, this was the podcast that broke the concept open for me and helped me put the word to what I’ve observed.
Jordan Harbinger - Dan Ariely | Why Rational People Believe Irrational Things
Idea Factory Outputs
One thing I’ve been trying to do: demonstrate how you can turn thoughts into ideas as quickly as possible. And this video shows how I’m taking a Dad Joke and turning it into revenue. But I’m also using that to evaluate myaicofounder.com and teach my 8-year-old lessons about entrepreneurship. Oh yeah, and teaching my 12-year-old that the harder he rolls his eyes at my jokes, the more effort I will put into stuff. Imagine the limitless energy potential of turning pre-teen and teen eye-rolls into energy. Interstellar travel, here we come!
Here’s a lesson I learned from my dad and turned it around to explore the world of content creators.
Here’s where I talked about creating a product roadmap as you are launching a new product and how I consider things:
And finally, here’s something I’ve changed my mind about (image links to thread).
Until next week!
~Leo