Hey newsletter community,
I’m writing to you from a cozy living room in San Francisco on a foggy Sunday morning.
This week, I consumed a lot of interesting content—mostly long-form podcasts and fiction. As a result, I collected lots of thoughts for this post, particularly about where ideas come from and how to refine them.
Enjoy :)
Ideas have people
In almost every job, there comes a point where you need to generate ideas. Writers need to come up with topics, product managers need to conceive new products, and scientists must brainstorm novel approaches to unsolved problems.
But idea generation is often frustrating. It requires time, effort, and consistency to develop original thought—sometimes it feels like trying to summon something from nothing.
There’s a quote that offers a helpful reframe:
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.
— Carl Jung
Instead of believing we must create ideas from scratch, we can think of ideas as something that arrives—something that finds us. Our job, then, is to position ourselves to receive them.
I stress-tested this concept with my friend Alice (the most talented writer I know and my newest subscriber—hi Alice!). We agreed that in our experience, ideas don’t precede writing; rather, writing itself produces ideas. The act of putting words down forces you to make connections you didn’t know were there.
This should be encouraging for anyone looking to generate better ideas or become a stronger writer (hint: the first goal naturally improves when you achieve the second).
Positioning yourself to receive ideas generally means showing up: dedicating time to sit down, open a blank page, and exercise your idea generation muscle. But how to we make this process less painful?
The blank slate problem
In UX design, there’s a well-known issue called the blank slate problem. This happens when an app or website presents an empty screen—usually because a user is new and hasn’t interacted with the product yet. A poorly designed blank slate leads to confusion, frustration, and even abandonment. When users don’t know what to do next, the cognitive effort required to figure it out feels too high.
Great interfaces solve this by offering prompts, guiding users toward their next action.
The same principle applies to idea generation: staring at a blank page with no starting point is paralyzing. The key is to design an entry point for your idea production.
Tabula rasa
To tackle the blank slate problem, I want to introduce an adjacent concept called the blank slate theory. This empiricist philosophical idea (also known as tabula rasa) posits that humans are born without innate knowledge, and that all learning comes from sensory perception and experience.
The mention of both sensory perception and experience is crucial, as these are the levers we have to work with to solve our blank slate problem. My take on this theory is that it should encourage us to both put ourselves in situations to perceive new things — read new books, travel to new places, listen to new music, meet new people — but also to create first hand experiences — write about them, describe them in your own words, discuss them, engage with them, and question them.
Input shapes output
Let’s revisit the sensory perception point. We all consume massive amounts of content—news, social media, podcasts, books, conversations. This steady stream of information shapes how we think and the ideas available to us.
It follows that the quality of what you consume directly impacts your ability to generate ideas. But I’ve found that less is more. When you limit your intake, you become more selective, gravitating toward what genuinely sparks your curiosity. That, in turn, fuels richer and more personal insights.
Limiting intake has an added benefit of decreasing your cognitive load—another useful UX design metaphor. Cognitive load refers to the mental effort required to process information and make decisions. When an interface overwhelms users with too many choices, features, or notifications, it becomes harder to navigate, leading to frustration and decision fatigue.
The same happens with idea generation: if your brain is overloaded with scattered, low-quality inputs, it becomes harder to make connections, recall useful information, or extract anything meaningful.
Well-designed interfaces simplify and prioritize information so users can focus on what matters most.
Likewise, curating your inputs—choosing depth over breadth—reduces noise and makes room for useful connections to emerge. Instead of drowning in information, you create the mental space for insights to take shape.
From thought to form
Just as consumption fuels ideas, reproducing them solidifies them. When you take an idea and try to express it—whether through writing, discussion, or adaptation into another format—you deepen your understanding. Often, you won’t even realize what you truly think about something until you try to articulate it.
Writing this very post proves the point. When I sat down, I had only a rough outline. But as I started putting thoughts into words, I realized I had far more ideas inside me than I’d initially recognized, and the outline completely changed. Simply by engaging with the material, I found myself being had by ideas, not the other way around.
Here’s a quote I read this week that I find to be a nice metaphor for not just idea generation, but how it can make you a more interesting person:
“I was struck again by how little he had altered since that time, except that he seemed somehow to have been filled in. In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from. But time had given him density, like an artist filling in the sketched-out form.”
— Transit, Rachel Cusk
Like a character gaining depth over time, our ideas—and even our own thinking—become filled in through experience, interaction, and articulation.
Making ideas pretty
Once you have your ideas, the next step is to make them pretty. Take your initial idea and iterate on it—refine, rework, and sculpt it until it feels like a personal work of art.
The best example I found of this comes from Derek Sivers. It’s hard to sum him up (you should really check out his About Me page — you won’t regret it), but to borrow from his own description, he is “ambitiously focused on creating. More than anything, [he wants] to make lots of stuff. [He wants] to make articles, books, websites, music, companies, systems, apps, and especially new ideas”
— hence his relevance to this week’s post.
Here’s an automated email his customers received when they purchased a CD from his company, CD Baby:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
I love this email because it’s a perfect example of taking an ordinary idea — an automated transactional email — and making it pretty. Practicing this not only makes work less boring, but also has the potential to turn something mundane into something interesting and sharable.
How can we make our ideas pretty? I’ve narrowed it down to three key principles: modality, simplification, and abstractions.
Modality
One way to refine an idea is by changing the mode in which you engage with it. Step away from screens. Work in different mediums. Change how you interact with your idea.
I noticed this effect on my (dog) walks. I felt ideas coming together in my head in a way that sitting at the desk didn’t grant me. Science backs this up: Stanford researchers examined creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat, and found that a person's creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking (source).
Walking is not the only option. Opting for analog tools like sketching, handwriting, and other raw materials engages different cognitive pathways, sparking new ideas.
Some people write their first drafts entirely on paper, saving digital tools for editing and refinement. It can be scary to write without the crutch of our digital editing tools — but some of the best advice I’ve received on this comes from one of my favorite authors Anne Lamott, who proposes shitty first drafts:
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, "Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?," you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.
— Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
Make a mess first, experiment with different modes, then clean it up later.
Simplification
Good creative work is simple and clear. Most people clutter their work with unnecessary elements, making it more difficult to understand the main message you’re trying to communicate. Bruce Lee said “hack away at the unessential.” Every word must earn its place!
Abstractions
Abstractions make difficult things easier to understand. It’s a concept I first learned in the context of Computer Science, in which there are many complex concepts that need to be abstracted out to more understandable terms. (This video explains abstractions well).
Think of an elevator. When you walk into an elevator, you see a set of buttons representing different floors you can navigate to. The concept of “floors” is an abstraction. Behind the scenes, a complex system of pulleys, cables, and weights is moving a metal box up and down a shaft. But you don’t need to understand any of that to use it—you just press a button.
If your ideas are complicated, use abstractions to make them pretty. In writing, you can use analogies. In speaking, you can use metaphors. In drawing, use diagrams. Just find ways to make your ideas more easily visualizable.
Having something to say
There’s a deeper, and perhaps less practical part of this post that I thought about a lot this week. In order for you to make anything, or feel compelled to make anything, you need to feel like you have something to say. Writing a newsletter was something that I had thought about doing for a while, but I wasn’t sure that I had something to say. It wasn’t until a recent period of change in my life that I felt more open to putting my ideas on paper and realized the importance of sharing them.
In a way, I felt that having gone through hardship and difficulty made this process easier, as it gave me something to say, or even something to prove. Different people are motivated by different things, but the hopeful reality I’ve discovered is that your hardest experiences can be your greatest source of creative inspiration.
This doesn’t mean that you have to experience a tragedy to produce good work, but maybe getting out of your comfort zone and going towards what’s difficult for you can be enough. While there’s plenty of research that shows that honing your strengths pays higher dividends than improving your weaknesses, life isn’t all about getting the highest return. Exploring what’s difficult for you can help you see new dimensions of yourself and give you something to say — something that can fuel your personal narrative and your (creative) work.
We are so schooled in the doctrine of self acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.
— Transit, Rachel Cusk
So if you want to discover what you have to say: go through difficult things, uncover your weaknesses, reflect on them, and always record your learnings along the way.
The blank slate problem and concept of cognitive effort is really interesting.
I immediately thought about Adobe Photoshop, there is no easy way to make a product that complex be easily understood by a novice, they would likely abandon it unless they have training. Adobe don't care about this because they build something for a specific market and they understand their audience. It's a defacto standard in its space, if you need to do serious photo editing, you probably already know about Photoshop.
If you take the example of Chat GPT from your post, the authors want this to be easily understood by anyone accessing their service, they are competing against several other vendors so they need an interface that coaches the user through how to use it.
In the world of software engineering where I come from, you have to understand your audience. Building an overly simplistic UI for professionals will drive them away. On the other hand, if your audience is more broad and are likely to stumble upon your product without understanding what it is beforehand, then building something with lots of features and customisability won't lead to good engagement.
Understanding your target audience's experience and their perception of your product should greatly influence your ideas too. Do I need to make this person feel safe using my product? Do I need to make them feel in charge? Do I need to make them feel like they are part of a community within this space?
Sometimes you don't have a choice so you have to build something that suits everyone, that's when the real fun begins.
Loved it, thank you for sharing it!