Is that the source of. If you were able
to deconstruct like where some of your best ideas came from?
Is there a process that's at the core of that?
Like, so some people, you know, walk and think.
Some people, like in the shower, the best ideas hit them. If you talk about
like Newton, Apple hitting them on the head. No,
I found out a long time ago I process things somewhat slowly.
So like in college I had friends who could study at the last minute,
get an A. Next day I can't do that at all. So I always front
loaded all the work. Like I do all the problems early,
you know, for finals, like the last three days, I wouldn't look at a book
because I want, you know, because like a new fact day before
finals may screw up my understanding of what I thought I knew. So my,
my, my goal is to always get it in and, and give
it time to soak. And I used to,
you know, I remember when we were doing like 3D calculus, I would have these
amazing dreams of 3D surfaces with normal, you know, calculating the
gradient. And this is like all come up. So it was like really fun,
like very visual. And if I got cycles
of that, that was useful. And the other is, is don't over filter
your ideas. Like, I like that process of brainstorming
where lots of ideas can happen. I like people who have lots of ideas and
they just let them sit. Then there's a. Yeah, I let them sit and let
it breathe a bit and then reduce
it to practice. Like at some point you really have to.
Does it really work? Like, is this real or not?
Right. But you have to do both. There's creative tension there.
Like, how do you be both open and precise?
Have you had ideas that you just. That sit in your mind for like years
before the. Sure. It's an interesting
way to just generate ideas and just let
them sit, let them sit there for a while.
I think I have a few of those ideas. Yeah, that was so funny.
Yeah, I think that's creativity,
discipline or something for the slow thinkers
in the room, I suppose because some people,
like you said, are just. Yeah,
it's really interesting. There's so much diversity in how people think,
you know, how fast or slow they are, how well they remember or don't.
Like, you know, I'm not super good at remembering facts, but processes
and methods. Like in our engineering, I went to Penn State and almost all
our engineering tests were open book. I could remember
the page and not the formula, but as soon as I saw the formula,
I could Remember the whole method? If I'd learned it.
Yeah. So it's a funny. Or some people could.
I just watched friends, like, flipping through the book, trying to find the formula,
even knowing that they'd done just as much work. And I would just open the
book, and I was on page 27, bottom half. I could see the whole thing
visually. Yeah. And, you know,
and you have to learn that about yourself and figure out what function optimally.
I had a friend who was always concerned. He didn't know how he came up
with ideas. He had lots of ideas, but he said they just sort of popped
up. Like he'd be working on something. You have this idea,
like, where does it come from? But you can have more awareness
of it. Like, how your
brain works is a little murky as you go down from the voice in your
head or the obvious visualizations. Like when you visualize something,
how does that happen? Yeah. If I say visualize
a volcano, it's easy to do. Right. And what does it actually look like when
you visualize it? I can visualize to the point where I don't see very much
out of my eyes, and I see the colors of the thing I'm visualizing.
Yeah, but there's like a. There's a shape, there's a texture, there's a color.
But there's also conceptual visualization. Like, what.
What are you actually visualizing when you're visualizing a volcano? Just like
with peripheral vision, you think you see the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a
good way to say it. You know, you have this kind of almost peripheral
vision of your visualizations. They're like these ghosts.
But if, you know, if you. If you work on it, you can get a
pretty high level of detail, and somehow you can walk along those visualizations and
come up with an idea, which is. But weird. But when you're thinking about
solving problems, like, you're. You're putting information
and you're exercising the stuff you do know, you're sort of teasing
the area that you don't understand and don't know,
but you can almost, you know, feel,
you know, that process happening. You know, that's. That's how I,
like, like. Like, I know sometimes
when I'm working really hard on something, like. Like I get really hot when I'm
sleeping. And, you know, it's like, we got the blankets. I wake up, all the
blankets are on the floor, and. And, you know, every time once.
Well, I wake up and think, wow, that was great. You know,
Are you able to. To reverse engineer. What the hell happened there?
Oh, sometimes it's vivid dreams and sometimes it's just kind of like you
say, like shadow thinking that you. You sort of have this feeling you.
You're going through this stuff. But it's. It's not that obvious. Isn't that
so amazing that the mind just does all these little experiments?
I never. You know, I thought. I always thought it's like a river that
you can't. You're just there for the ride. But you're right. If you prep it.
No, it's. It's all understandable. Meditation really helps.
You got to start figuring out you need to learn language of your own mind.
And there's multiple levels of it, but the abstractions
again, right? It's somewhat comprehensible and observable and
feelable or whatever the right word is.
Yeah. You're not along for the ride. You are the ride.