Phases of vision
Does your creative process follow the same three phases as mine?
I’m toying around with some ideas about where ideas come from—especially vision, which I think of as a special kind of idea that inspires and motivates groups of people.
For contrast, here are some ideas that aren’t vision.
“I don’t like the way these pants fit.”
“I need to remember to buy eggs this week.”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“The Pythagorean Theorem states that…”
“Never gonna give you up; never gonna let you down…”
Unlike these other kinds of thoughts/ideas/memes, the need to foster cooperation means that vision plays by different rules. The most powerful kind of vision is deeply persuasive while also being viral.
Persuasive: it feels obvious and inevitable in hindsight
Viral: it’s easy to remember and share with others.
Ideas like this will naturally take on a life of their own. I’ve been thinking about what vision looks like in embryo.
Three phases
Reflecting on times when I’ve arrived at a vision that successfully motivated other people (founding companies, organizing a recurring game night, starting team traditions; building a complicated Halloween decoration with my kids), I find that vision follows three relatively consistent phases.
First, there’s an intuitive phase. Ideas occur to me as I go through life. Often they’re triggered by specific conversations or experiences, but I couldn’t tell you exactly why or how—it’s subconscious. These ideas come in all shapes and sizes: analogies, questions, specific factoids that seem worth remembering. Often, they start out vague, and I need to write them down (or draw them) before they slip away. I find that capturing these proto-ideas this way makes them occur to me more frequently, even if I throw away the paper and never look at it again.
Also, ideas bubble up more frequently when I’m in a curious and optimistic mood, talk to people with interesting backgrounds, and exercise and sleep well. But beyond cultivating a ready mind and nurturing insight when it arrives, I can’t force it.
Second, there’s an exploration phase. Over time, I’ll encounter more instances and variations of some of the intuitive proto-ideas. If they seem useful or interesting enough, I’ll start to explore them more consciously. (A particularly strong signal is someone else who I respect independently expressing interest or curiosity in an idea similar to mine.)
For me, “exploration” usually takes the form of writing in my journal, searching for similar ideas on the web, or maybe creating a prototype. I try to frame a well-posed question or well-framed task, and then do whatever thought experiments, real experiments, or secondary research are required to answer it to my satisfaction.
A few recent ones, from the last ~6 months.1
“What are real examples where different kinds of intelligence are economic substitutes?”
“Make a list of all the ways text can be animated in video games or visual novels.”
“Create a procedurally-generated animation that captures the essence of tall dandelions bobbing over grass in a lawn.”
In general, the theme is “getting to personal conviction about a thing that was previously a mystery.”
Third, there’s a distillation phase. This is usually reserved for vision-type ideas, where I want to persuade/enlist/bring along other people. I find that the crucial moment is the invitation, where I ask someone else to take action—even a very small action, like talking to me about it for 15 minutes—that will involve them in the creation of the idea.
Sometimes this is very simple. I’ll often draft an email to a specific person, laying out my request, my reasoning behind it, and why I’d expect the other person to be interested. If it seems strong enough, then I’ll send the email, or use the text as the basis for a conversation. For small-scale vision unlikely to face much skepticism or resistance (“We’re hosting a game night on Friday. Want to come?”), this is often enough.
If the idea is more complex/nonobvious/potentially controversial, then I’ll often think through different ways to explain/ground/justify it. Sometimes this requires gathering more evidence, or investing more deeply in experiments of my own. testing out strawman versions of the pitch with other people.
In general, the theme is “finding the shortest, most compelling lines of proof for a concept that wouldn’t be obvious otherwise.”
How long does it take?
I find that each of these stages takes orders of magnitude more than the one before it.
Ideas in stage 1 come for free, all the time, as long as I’m not too busy or stressed. I just need to take the time to jot them down—often less than 4 words is enough—so that I don’t lose them.
Ideas in stage 2 can often be run to ground in minutes. I’ll sometimes tackle them on a Saturday morning, or during a lunch break. When a prototype, proof, or extensive web research is required, the time required can grow to a couple of hours. I try to break my tasks and questions down so that they don’t take longer than this to answer.
Ideas in stage 3 can get very big. Sometimes I’ll get lucky, and an answer will arrive in another flash of intuitive insight. But more often, it takes much longer—exponentially longer. It can take days to sift through all the different ways to make a case. And if making the case requires conversations or experiments that I can’t quickly cook up on my own, the time span can grow into weeks or months.
Is this just me?
I’m very curious if others’ experiences match mine. I have a lot of specific habits built up around this flow of ideas, but I’ve never taken the time to put it fully into words before.
Over the years, I’ve found this to be a strong pattern. Even though a lot of the process is intuitive and I’m doing most of this exploration in background threads, I can pretty reliably identify the phase where a given idea is, and the work it would take me to get to the next step.
Also, the steps feel quite distinct to me. I hardly ever try to distill an idea before I have conviction in it. And once I have conviction, I rarely find new evidence that overturns my original conclusion. (Not never, but rarely.) The thing that does change all the time is my understanding of how other people react to these ideas, and therefore the best way to boil them down and pitch them. That’s what the distillation phase is for, and why it takes so long.
What say you?
Like I said, I’m very curious about others’ experiences:
Is this how creativity works for you?
Do you go through the same phases? If not, how is your process different?
If so, what else have you noticed about the phases? Do you have techniques for making them work better? Places you find yourself getting stuck?
It’s funny. I was deliberately trying to pick small, throwaway examples. But just the act of writing them down with enough detail that they’ll make sense to others in this blog post is making them firmer and more real. On my whiteboards, the actual text reads:
Price elasticity of intelligence
Animated text
Dandelions, procgen