In his latest book, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” author Steven Johnson explores not only the “Eureka!” moment in idea generation, but also the path people take to get there.
In fact, he says that in all the history of great ideas, very few have come from a singular moment in time. Rather, they develop after months and months of thought and incubation or they are built in the figurative coffeehouse, through social interactions.
Johnson credits the English coffeehouses of the mid to late 1600s with spreading the Enlightenment, as he said in his TEDGlobal 2010 talk. Indeed, the coffeehouse provided “a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. … An astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.”
The point, as Johnson says in both videos, is that “chance favors the connected mind.”
An idea, he said at TED, is actually a network of neurons working together in your brain. Similarly, a people need a network of friends and colleagues working together to bring an idea into fruition. An idea shouldn’t be whole at the start. Instead, it should come from a combination smaller hunches mingling so that they become bigger, more complete and better able to achieve their full vision.
Do you think Johnson is right about “Eureka!” moments? Why or why not? Have you experienced slowly formed hunches mingling to develop breakthrough ideas? How? Share your thoughts below.
– Kathie