Why A Good Idea Takes 13 Years To Arrive
The amazing power of the “slow hunch”
In his terrific book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson wrote about a fascinating aspect of big ideas:
They take a long time to bake.
We like to think that big ideas come from a sudden “aha” moment, but as Johnson argued, this most often isn’t true. He investigated a bunch of famously big ideas and found that their creators spent years, and even decades slowly building up towards their big epiphany.
They often had an inkling of the idea early on, as a sort of ill-formed hunch. Then they took a long, long time to refine it. Over the years, as they read and learned and wrote and experienced life, they’d keep on returning to their hunch, feeling it slowly take shape.
Then one day, years later — when the time was ripe — they turned that hunch into the finished idea.
That’s how Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, as Johnson notes: In decades of copious note-taking, he kept on gathering more and more data that suggested the contours of evolution, and he’d slowly poke at the concept. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web after decades of obsessing over a dream of the perfect info-organizing technology, and after years of actually coding different data-sorting apps. In…
