How to Create Original Ideas

“You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’” — George Bernard Shaw

All of humanity’s greatest inventions — the steam engine, the telephone, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the personal computer, the web browser — have all come from people who had a creative insight. They were able to imagine a radically different future from what currently existed at the time. How do they do it? Are they born with it? What enables someone to come up with a creative, original idea?

We may not all have the same level of creativity as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or Steve Jobs. But according to Wharton professor Adam Grant in his book Originals, each one of us can learn to become an Original — someone who creates and champions original ideas.

According to Grant, there are three approaches that all of us can use to generate and select creative ideas:

• Question defaults
• Generate a lot of ideas
• Get peer feedback

Question defaults

Developing an original idea often starts with questioning defaults. As Grant writes:

“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists… The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of deja vu. Deja vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse — we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain insights into old problems.”

Many of us encounter a familiar situation, and we don’t stop to question to default. Something is cumbersome or annoying or expensive, but we deal with it, because that’s just the way it is. That’s the way it has always been.

Originals don’t accept the defaults. Grant shared the story of the founders of Warby Parker, who one day asked the simple question: Why are eyeglasses as expensive as an iPhone? The iPhone was a marvel of technology — it packed tremendous computational power, network connectivity, a digital camera, and a flat screen. You could do so much with the iPhone. Eyeglasses, on the other hand, hadn’t fundamentally evolved in decades. Yet they often cost just as much as the iPhone. As the founders did more research, they discovered that a single company (Luxottica) had a near monopoly position in the global eyewear industry, and was using its dominant position to charge exorbitant prices. This knowledge led the Warby Parkers founders to realize that they could disrupt the eyewear industry.

The idea of questioning defaults — using vuja de to see a familiar situation with a fresh perspective — reminds me of First Principles thinking. Elon Musk of Tesla describes the essence of First Principles Thinking as follows:

“First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?’ … and then reason up from there… I think it is important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done or it is like what other people are doing… it’s like slight iterations on a theme.”

When you automatically accept the default in a situation, you are reasoning by analogy. On the other hand, when you question the defaults and experience vuja de, you’re using First Principles thinking. It’s the First Principles approach that will lead to the creation of a “secret,” as Peter Thiel writes about in Zero to One. A “secret,” according to Thiel, is an important truth that very few people will agree with you on. It’s an idea that was once unknown and unsuspected. By definition, it’s an original idea.

Generate a lot of ideas

In addition to questioning defaults, how else can you create an original idea? Have lots of them.

“Creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which game them more variation and a higher chance of originality. ‘The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,’ [psychologist Dean] Simonton notes, are ‘a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.’”

According to Grant, rarely do creative geniuses have one single brilliant flash of insight that leads to a groundbreaking innovation. Rather, they have a large number of ideas — some good, a few exceptional, but many not so great. He shares the examples of William Shakespeare, who wrote his masterpieces MacBeth, Othello, and King Lear during the same period he wrote “un-exceptional” plays like Timon of Athens and All’s Well that Ends Well. Other examples include:

• Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven: “To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand.”
• Picasso: thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures which led to a handful of world-famous works of art
• Edison: “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted… on one hand.”
• Einstein: 248 publications, yet his biggest contributions were two theories: the special and general theories of relativity

Grant writes:

“When it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. ‘Original thinkers,’ Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, ‘will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas — especially novel ideas.’ Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.”

As I read this passage from Grant, I was reminded about a quote from Nobel Prize winning biochemist Linus Pauling:

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.”

Grant’s message is this: don’t be afraid to generate a lot of ideas, even if some (many) of them are bad. In fact, push yourself to come up with as many ideas as you can. The more you push yourself, the more you will move beyond just the obvious, default ideas. As you push beyond the obvious, you will have more freedom to explore, and this may in fact lead you to the truly novel idea.

As you push yourself to generate a lot of ideas, consider using this tool from Google: think 10x.

In the book How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, the authors observe:

“Most people tend to think incrementally rather than transformationally or galactically… That’s why one of Eric and Larry’s [Google’s cofounder] challenges to engineers and product managers in Google product reviews was always ‘you aren’t thinking big enough’… Later replaced by the Larry Page directive to ‘think 10x.’”

The authors explain why it’s important to “think 10x.”

“The obvious benefit of thinking big is that it gives smart creatives much more freedom. It removes constraints and spurs creativity… Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, notes that if you want to create a car that gets 10 percent better mileage, you just have to tweak the current design, but if you want one that gets five hundred miles per gallon, you need to start over. Just the thought process — How would I start over? — can spur ideas that were previously not considered.”

Get peer feedback

I mentioned the quote from Linus Pauling above encouraging us to have many ideas. But I haven’t yet shared the second part of his quote. Here it is:

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”

So it’s not enough to generate a bunch of ideas — how do you tell the good from the bad? You will need to actually pursue one of these ideas, which means that you will need to invest your time, resources, and possibly your reputation.

It turns out that we are notoriously bad at evaluating if any of our own ideas will be valuable. We often fall victim to one of two biases when evaluating our own ideas: overconfidence or confirmation bias.

• Overconfidence: We have unrealistically high confidence in our own judgment, predictions, and intuitions. We tend to believe our own ideas are better than they actually are.
• Confirmation bias: We fall in love with our own idea. We then only pay attention to evidence that confirms our view, and we ignore evidence that contradicts it.

These biases tend to push us in the direction of false positives — believing that our ideas will be successful, even if they are unlikely to be.

We can’t necessarily trust the judgment of test audiences or our managers, either. Both groups will tend to relate a new idea to pre-existing concepts. As Grant explains:

“In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail… the more expertise and experience that people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world… As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our own prototypes.”

This is the reason why test audiences and studio management were negative on Seinfeld when the show was first piloted in the late 1980s. Neither group could relate the show to familiar, contemporary shows like Cheers or the Cosby Show.

Test audiences were conscious of the fact that they were evaluating the show, but they were not necessarily experiencing it. Since they were judging the show, they defaulted back to whether the show fit the mold of other shows they knew. Since Seinfeld didn’t fit the mold, they rejected it.

Managers also vet new ideas with an evaluative mindset. Like test audiences, they compare the new idea to familiar concepts or patterns that they know have worked in the past. On top of that, they tend to be even more risk averse. They have invested years of their career to climb to their position within a company, and as such, they want to protect themselves and their reputation against a bad bet. So they’re more worried about risk mitigation than in backing novel ideas.

What’s the answer? As Grant writes:

“So neither test audiences nor managers are ideal judges of creative ideas. They’re too prone to false negatives; they focus too much on reasons to reject an idea and stick too closely to existing prototypes. And we’ve seen that creators struggle as well, because they’re too positive about their own ideas. But there is one group of forecasters that does come close to attaining mastery: fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas.”

Grant advises us to get feedback on our ideas from our peers and colleagues. Unlike test audiences and managers, they aren’t as risk averse and are “open to seeing the potential in unusual possibilities, which guards against false negatives.” On the other hand, they don’t have a stake in the outcome of our ideas. So they can be unbiased and avoid the overconfidence or confirmation bias that the creators themselves may have. That helps reduce the possibility of false positives.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

We all want to create positive change and progress. To have this kind of exceptional impact, we need to be “unreasonable” — and original. Nobody ever changed the world by incrementally improving on something that already existed. To create vertical progress, you have to develop a truly original concept that’s 10x better.

How do you do that? Adam Grant presents three approaches for generating and selecting creative ideas:

• Question defaults
• Generate a lot of ideas
• Get peer feedback

Originality starts with questioning defaults and the status quo. Ideally, we can experience vuja de — where we encounter something familiar, but we see if with a fresh perspective. We can use First Principles thinking to boil things down to fundamental truths, and reason up from there. We can avoid reasoning by analogy, which focuses on what has already been done, or what people are already doing — and which leads in the direction of defaults and incrementalism.

We also need to generate a lot of ideas. Some ideas will be good, many bad, but a few will be exceptional. Many of history’s creative geniuses produced a high volume of ideas and output — and only a handful of their ideas went on to change the world. Push yourself to generate more ideas, and move beyond the obvious to create the freedom to explore. Use 10x thinking to stretch your ideas.

Finally, you have to know how to separate the good from the bad ideas. Unfortunately, we’re usually not a very good judge of our own ideas. We tend to be overconfident or fall victim to confirmation bias, resulting in too many false positives. Test audiences and managers are also usually not very effective. They are often risk averse and beholden to familiar concepts; they tend to look for reasons why novel ideas won’t work, resulting in too many false negatives. To get the best feedback, seek out your peers and colleagues. They are open to novel ideas and unusual possibilities, and they will be more unbiased when evaluating our ideas than we will be.