101 | Your Top Idea, and Letting It Fester

What's at the top of your brain? And what's the benefit you get from having to wait on something, letting you brain roll over it?

• Paul Graham - The Top Idea in Your Mind

Transcript:

Hi, I'm your host Matt Stauffer, and this episode 101 of The Five Minute Geek Show, a weekly show about development and everything around it. It's one topic per episode about front-end, back-end, mobile, project management, design, entrepreneurship, whatever. If it's geeky, it fits.

Today, we're going to be talking about your top idea. I've talked about it a little bit in the past, but essentially, at any given moment, there's usually one primary thing that your brain returns to you when it gives a moment to rest. I often have about seven of these, which drives my wife nuts. We've talked often about the fact that I need to have less commitments. Not just because I need to be spending less time doing things, but because I need spaces for my brain to not only rest and have moments where I think about things family life related, not just all these kind of entrepreneurial and work ideas that I'm doing.

So, essentially, when you have nothing else to do. When you're stuck in traffic, or when you are using the restroom, or showering, or taking a walk or something like that, your brain kind of rolls on to things. The things that your brain roll onto, often those are kind of like ... People frequently know this, are the things that ... We get some really great thinking done then, right? You've got stuck on something at work, and you go home and you sleep on it, and you come back and you have an answer. Or you go, you take a 15 minute walk.

Sometimes you take a 15 minute walk, your brain just needs to re-orient itself. But sometimes ... For example, I'll often have an idea for an application or for a software of service, or for a project or a book or a blog post or a video. I'll have the idea long before I create the thing. I had an idea for a new product ... Not a product but that open-source thing that I want to do, like 11 months ago or something. Every once a while, it pops into my brain. It hasn't been the top of my mind, but it pops into my brain for a little bit. I think about it, and I think about one aspect of it, one nuance. Well, how would I get these people to carry the content here? Or, what would motivate somebody to want to carry the content here versus somewhere else? Or, how would I handle the fact that there's this type of data coming in there, but that type of data coming in there?

So, it pops up every once in a while, and I kind of think about it for a little bit, and the thinking that I do there kind of moves into the storehouse of answers that I've come up with for those things. So, every single time I've ever created something of significance size, there's been years or at least many months of thinking about the thing prior to the point where I actually get started.

So this thing, I bought a domain name for it three weeks ago, and I told everybody at Titan about it three weeks ago, but I've been thinking about the thing for months. I've been thinking about it even more frequently since then. It's nearly at the top idea of my mind kind of thing where most of my free time, I think, "Well, okay, here's another thing I need to think about it." Then I think through it for a while, while I'm putting my daughter to sleep, or something like that.

So it's interesting that there's not just this idea of the top idea in your mind. I've talked often with people about this top idea in your mind thing, Paul Graham's somebody who wrote something about it recently. It's not just the fact that you have one, which of course is an important conversation, because if you've never thought through these things, some of these important things about that are ... Like, if you're trying to split your job responsibility between multiple roles, there may be certain roles that never get to be the top idea in your brain, which means they never get that kind of free time thinking or that free moment thinking or that extra brain power that allows you to power through some things that might not happen during your normal, actual application of the job.

Often I've told people who've wanted to do three things, I'm like, none of those three things are going to be done ... Or at least probably two of those three things are actually going to be done to a one-third attention level, because two of them are not going to be the forefront idea. So it's not even the time to spend on the thing, it's the time to spend thinking on the thing. So there's definitely things worth thinking about, just with regard to what is at the forefront of your mind.

But what I want to talk about is giving space for yourself to process through the thing over time. It's almost as if ... So, okay, we did a developer battle. I think I'm goin...