Paul Graham - Essays

What happens in that shower? It seems to me that ideas just pop into my head. But can we say more than that?

Taking a shower is like a form of meditation. You're alert, but there's nothing to distract you. It's in a situation like this, where your mind is free to roam, that it bumps into new ideas.

What happens when your mind wanders? It may be like doodling. Most people have characteristic ways of doodling. This habit is unconscious, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting. I started to make the kind of gestures I'd make if I were drawing from life. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly. [2]

Perhaps letting your mind wander is like doodling with ideas. You have certain mental gestures you've learned in your work, and when you're not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly. In effect, you call the same functions on random arguments. That's what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.

Conveniently, as I was writing this, my mind wandered: would it be useful to have metaphors in a programming language? I don't know; I don't have time to think about this. But it's convenient because this is an example of what I mean by habits of mind. I spend a lot of time thinking about language design, and my habit of always asking "would x be useful in a programming language" just got invoked.

If new ideas arise like doodles, this would explain why you have to work at something for a while before you have any. It's not just that you can't judge ideas till you're an expert in a field. You won't even generate ideas, because you won't have any habits of mind to invoke.

Of course the habits of mind you invoke on some field don't have to be derived from working in that field. In fact, it's often better if they're not. You're not just looking for good ideas, but for good new ideas, and you have a better chance of generating those if you combine stuff from distant fields. As hackers, one of our habits of mind is to ask, could one open-source x? For example, what if you made an open-source operating system? A fine idea, but not very novel. Whereas if you ask, could you make an open-source play? you might be onto something.

Are some kinds of work better sources of habits of mind than others? I suspect harder fields may be better sources, because to attack hard problems you need powerful solvents. I find math is a good source of metaphors-- good enough that it's worth studying just for that. Related fields are also good sources, especially when they're related in unexpected ways. Everyone knows computer science and electrical engineering are related, but precisely because everyone knows it, importing ideas from one to the other doesn't yield great profits. It's like importing something from Wisconsin to Michigan. Whereas (I claim) hacking and painting are also related, in the sense that hackers and painters are both makers, and this source of new ideas is practically virgin territory.

In theory you could stick together ideas at random and see what you came up with. What if you built a peer-to-peer dating site? Would it be useful to have an automatic book? Could you turn theorems into a commodity? When you assemble ideas at random like this, they may not be just stupid, but semantically ill-formed. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity? You got me. I didn't think of that idea, just its name.

You might come up with something useful this way, but I never have. It's like knowing a fabulous sculpture is hidden inside a block of marble, and all you have to do is remove the marble that isn't part of it. It's an encouraging thought, because it reminds you there is an answer, but it's not much use in practice because the search space is too big.

I find that to have good ideas I need to be working on some problem. You can't start with randomness. You have to start with a problem, then let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form.

In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions. Most people prefer to remain in denial about problems. It's obvious why: problems are irritating. They're problems! Imagine if people in 1700 saw their lives the way we'd see them. It would have been unbearable. This denial is such a powerful force that, even when presented with possible solutions, people often prefer to believe they wouldn't work.

I saw this phenomenon when I worked on spam filters. In 2002, most people preferred to ignore spam, and most of those who didn't preferred to believe the heuristic filters then available were the best you could do.

I found spam intolerable, and I felt it had to be possible to recognize it statistically. And it turns out that was all you needed to solve the problem. The algorithm I used was ridiculously simple. Anyone who'd really tried to solve the problem would have found it. It was just that no one had really tried to solve the problem. [3]

Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.

So far most of what I've said applies to ideas in general. What's special about startup ideas? Startup ideas are ideas for companies, and companies have to make money. And the way to make money is to make something people want.

Wealth is what people want. I don't mean that as some kind of philosophical statement; I mean it as a tautology.

So an idea for a startup is an idea for something people want. Wouldn't any good idea be something people want? Unfortunately not. I think new theorems are a fine thing to create, but there is no great demand for them. Whereas there appears to be great demand for celebrity gossip magazines. Wealth is defined democratically. Good ideas and valuable ideas are not quite the same thing; the difference is individual tastes.

But valuable ideas are very close to good ideas, especially in technology. I think they're so close that you can get away with working as if the goal were to discover good ideas, so long as, in the final stage, you stop and ask: will people actually pay for this? Only a few ideas are likely to make it that far and then get shot down; RPN calculators might be one example.

One way to make something people want is to look at stuff people use now that's broken. Dating sites are a prime example. They have millions of users, so they must be promising something people want. And yet they work horribly. Just ask anyone who uses them. It's as if they used the worse-is-better approach but stopped after the first stage and handed the thing over to marketers.

Of course, the most obvious breakage in the average computer user's life is Windows itself. But this is a special case: you can't defeat a monopoly by a frontal attack. Windows can and will be overthrown, but not by giving people a better desktop OS. The way to kill it is to redefine the problem as a superset of the current one. The problem is not, what operating system should people use on desktop computers? but how should people use applications? There are answers to that question that don't even involve desktop computers.

Everyone thinks Google is going to solve this problem, but it is a very subtle one, so subtle that a company as big as Google might well get it wrong. I think the odds are better than 50-50 that the Windows killer-- or more accurately, Windows transcender-- will come from some little startup.

Another classic way to make something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commmodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. And it is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try.

This was Henry Ford's plan. He made cars, which had been a luxury item, into a commodity. But the idea is much older than Henry Ford. Water mills transformed mechanical power from a luxury into a commodity, and they were used in the Roman empire. Arguably pastoralism transformed a luxury into a commodity.