Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Where do good ideas come from? This sounds impossible to answer. Don’t ideas come in a flash, a la the Eureka moment, the lightbulb moment? How can that be explained? Surprisingly, Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From , argues that there are certain patterns to the origin of good ideas.   Take Charles Babbage, the man called the father of the modern-day computer. Sure, it was a great idea, but it took centuries before his idea could be realized. Which is why Johnson prefers to call him the great grandfather! And that quip brings us to Johnson’s first point: most good ideas need to come from the area that scientist Stuart Kauffman described as the “adjacent possible” : “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things.” Most change and innovation is usually restricted to what lies just beyond the current state. Anything too far outside the realm of the adjacent possible is an idea “ahead of its time”. This i...

Sometimes, when we see people (or companies) make terrible choices and get butchered, we wonder: How could they not have seen that coming? Why didn’t they think deeper about it when they had a chance? There are (obviously) many reasons for that, but here are a few more of the common ones. Sometimes, it’s because people have a mental model of the world that they truly believe in. Leonardo di Caprio describes it in the movie, Inception : “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.” What’s worse is that just having an opinion is bad enough at times, says Leo Tolstoy: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to th...

A clerk in New Delhi when told that the visitor was from the San Francisco Bay Area replied, “Oh that is the center of the universe”! When asked why, he said: “Because the center of the universe is wherever there is the least resistance to new ideas.” If that didn’t make sense, let me explain. The Bay Area stretches from San Francisco to San Jose. Or to put it differently, it is Silicon Valley. America produces more new ideas than any other country. And within America, it’s Silicon Valley. Kind of like fractal geometry, huh?! Kelly then explores why that is the case. If you stick to more recent history, the answer usually revolves around Stanford University (They fund companies of their alumni within this area since it is close to the university; their students are very smart; ergo…and then it becomes a virtuous cycle of success attracting more braniacs…). Kelly though goes much farther back and gives J. S. Holliday’s take on it: “(J. S. Holliday) argues that it began...

In an earlier blog , I wrote about Jared Diamond’s theory that agriculture was the pivotal point in deciding why Europe (instead of Africa or native America or the Aborigines) went on to dominate the world.  That leads to the next question: why did the next big transformation, the Industrial Revolution, largely happen in England, not some other European country? William Rosen’s answer to that question is part of his terrific book, The Most Powerful Idea in the World . It all started when the British began to think there was a way for anyone to become rich. At that time, “everything of value… was either land or the produce of land”. Since land was limited, by definition, it could be redistributed, but not created anew. Was there some other way? Enter Edward Coke. He carved out a law that legalized patents that could be awarded to the “person who introduced the invention to the realm”. Next on the scene was John Locke, who felt that “rightful property is derived from the la...

Thanks to the Internet, the gatekeepers of content and what gets published are dead. Anyone can post a blog, tweet his view, or post a comment below an article and the whole world can see it. But that’s not always a good thing, says Alan Jacobs : “What if your ideas are crap? What good does it do — for you or the world — if you are clever and efficient in communicating thoughts that are carelessly arrived at, or ill-formed and incompletely worked through, or utterly unimaginative repetitions of what people in your would-be peer group have already said?” Reading a lot isn’t the solution. If you read stuff from a certain era only (say, present day), then CS Lewis warns that you are blinded to the “great mass of common assumptions” shared by most people in any age. Lewis’ solution? “ The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” No, not because the classics are smarter: “Not, ...

Amazon recently bought Twitch for a billion dollars. If you are wondering what Twitch is, let Peter Kafka and Eric Johnson explain : “For the uninitiated, Twitch is a platform for making and talking about videos of videogame play. About a million users a month record themselves playing videogames, while the rest — pegged at 50 million unique viewers in July — watch and comment on the videos.” If that sounds insane to you, consider what John Gruber has to say : “The future of TV is online streaming, not traditional “channels” that come through cable or satellite…My son and his friends watch far more YouTube content than they do traditional TV. Cable TV is dying.” Seth Godin commented on how he had a similar idea way back in 1989! Of course, back then, it meant making “videotapes of people playing video games”, not online streaming. Godin though isn’t bitter: “No, the hard part isn't merely thinking of an idea…The truly hard part is, 25 years later, sticking with it lo...

“Ideas worth spreading”: the catchphrase for TED. That choice of words is also the reason for this Umair Haque article criticizing the “Ideas Industry” , the poster child for which is, of course, TED. (Sometimes it’s fun to read an article like this: how could someone possibly dislike TED, right?). Note that Haque coins the term “TED thinking” to collectively refer to 800-word blog posts, business best-sellers and of course, the famous 18-minute talk itself. So what is Haque’s problem with “TED thinking”? Well, it’s that TED thinking makes you believe it’s a Great Idea only if it can be “simplified, reduced, made into convenient, disposable nuggets of infotainment”. It places “climactic epiphany before experience, education, and elevation.” Haque then uses analogies that blew me away: “In that sense, TED thinking is like a one-night stand with ideas. One night stands can be fun, and may sometimes even lead to something more — but they're not the great, worthy love...