# Good Ideas Require Fermentation Coming up with good ideas is like fermentation. It requires: 1. Good Ingredients * Remove the bad ingredients (news) * Consume the good (books, hard problems) 2. Remind your brain of the right problems to work on * Feed your brain with the problems you want it to solve 3. Environment * Good ideas require boredom. Little else can be occupying your thoughts. Some interesting points here: * Whatever you pay attention to is being fermented by your brain * If you only read the popular new books everyone else is reading, you will come up with the same thoughts as everyone else * The most important food to constantly feed your brain is the problems you want it to be solving * Think of your time as explicitly allocated to loading in information or towards seeing what your brain shoots out (this is similar to [Babble and Prune](Babble%20and%20Prune.md)) * You can’t always have all the time in the world, but when you have the space to noodle on something, take it. I’ll narrow down what I’m going to write about in this newsletter by Monday or Tuesday of the week before, then spend the rest of the week seeing what ideas pop up about the various topic ideas. By Monday, I’ll typically have the skeleton of a post fully flushed out in one of them. If I waited until Monday to start jotting ideas down, it would be much harder, and the post would certainly be much worse. --- Date: 20240721 Links to: Tags: References: * [The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas - Nat Eliason's Essays](https://blog.nateliason.com/p/fermenting-great-ideas)