今日推荐开源项目：《瞎讲 bullshit.js》
今日推荐英文原文：《The 4 Step Guide to Coming Up with High-Quality Ideas》
今日推荐开源项目：《瞎讲 bullshit.js》传送门：GitHub链接
推荐理由：今日搞怪项目，原理并不复杂，代码和效果也很简单——将页面上的某些词汇变成另外一些词汇……具体效果当然是自己亲眼看看才是最直接的。同类最佳，开箱即用，量子波动……这些词汇听起来似乎很高大上，但是并不是说堆叠好词就能写出好文章来，尽管包装是必要的，可别忘了产品本身才是最重要的组成部分。
今日推荐英文原文：《The 4 Step Guide to Coming Up with High-Quality Ideas》作者：Megan Holstein
原文链接：https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-4-step-guide-to-coming-up-with-high-quality-ideas-48fd7e04d2ae
推荐理由：想出一个好办法的技巧——有些时候你需要在找到好办法的办法而不是找到好办法上下点功夫
The 4 Step Guide to Coming Up with High-Quality Ideas
Most ideas are terrible. Here’s how to have ones that aren’t.
There is nothing more demoralizing than sitting down in front of a computer ready to create something and having no idea what to create. You know there’s a world of great ideas out there ready to become reality, yet you cannot think of a single one of them. A lack of ideas is the bane of creators everywhere.Creators resort to all kinds of bizarre behaviors in order to come up with ideas. They do cleanses and detoxes and try new mediums and go on creative retreats and do brainstorming exercises, all in order to come up with just one good idea.
These are all well and good, but they don’t get to the root of the issue. They treat ideas like discrete phenomena that you should be able to call upon at will.
Ideas don’t work like that. They are not something you can pull out of thin air. Ideas are like the fruit of a tree; if you want a tree to grow more fruit, you don’t ask yourself “how can I make more fruit.” You ask yourself “what can I do to make this tree grow more fruit? How can I make this tree healthy?”
The tree that produces the fruit we call an idea is your mind. If you want to have more ideas, you shouldn’t be focusing on “coming up with ideas,” you should be focused on nurturing your mind so it can produce more ideas all on its own.
What follows is a list of ways you can nurture your mind:
1. Consume a lot of information
If your mind is the tree that produces ideas, information is fertilizer for the soil.An idea is a new and novel connection between previously unrelated pieces of information in your mind. If you have no information in your mind, you are not able to have ideas. So, the first step to having ideas is to have some information you can use.
Not just any information will do. Much like how the quality of the food you eat directly impacts your health, the quality of the information you consume directly impacts the health of your mind.
Most people fertilize their minds with low-quality information like Facebook posts, Twitter rants, and whatever people happen to be gossiping about at work. As a result, most people have low-quality ideas.
To have high-quality ideas, cut out this low-quality information and replace it with high-quality information. Some sources of high-quality information are:
- Books. (Also included: audiobooks) Long-form text — even fiction — is immensely enriching for the mind. Reading long-form information improves our working memory, our reasoning ability, and our ability to tell stories. Short-form text tends to cover only superficial facts, whereas long-form text includes a great deal of historical and scientific data with which you can form ideas. In addition, whereas social media posts and low-quality information tends to be inflammatory and one-sided, books are far more likely to be balanced and thoughtful.
- Podcasts. (Also included: TED talks & high-quality articles such as those on Medium, Aeon, and The New York Times.) While podcasts are not as enriching as reading books, the shorter form of podcasts allows people to get a great deal of the value of a book without committing nearly as much time to getting it.
2. Create mental space
If information is the soil that fertilizes the tree of ideas, mental space is the sunlight that helps it grow.Mental space for deep thought is vital for creating new connections. If your mind is constantly being assaulted by sensory input, it never has a chance to engage in this deep thought.
Many of the world’s most successful people understand the importance of mental space. Bill Gates takes what he famously calls “think weeks,” where he spends a week doing nothing but consuming massive amounts of information and thinking deeply about the problems he wants to solve.
If you’re like most people, you are constantly facing a firehose of stimulation. At any given moment, you are listening to music, texting friends, scrolling social media, listening to or watching YouTube, or playing Netflix in the background. This is on top of regular stimulation, like road-noise, Slack messages from your boss, requests from your children or parents, and other long-term life pressures.
If you want to have high-quality ideas, you need to make time in your day to just exist.
Here are some ways you can do this:
- Meditate. Meditation is having a moment in popular culture for many reasons, one of which is that its dead simple. You just sit down, close your eyes, and meditate. Many people use meditation apps, which is no more difficult — merely pop in your headphones, open your meditation app, and you are good to go. Meditation also has a lot of bang for your buck: ten minutes of meditation a day can have an incredible impact on your quality of life.
- Take a walk. Many great thinkers swear by the power of taking a walk. Thomas Jefferson swore by the power of regular walking. Henry David Thoreau considered walking not only the most worthwhile form of exercise but itself a valid purpose for your day. (For best result, do not listen to music during your walk.)
The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best. — Thomas Jefferson
3. Exercise regularly
Most of the time, when people talk about exercise, they talk about the direct benefits of exercise: losing weight and looking hot, feeling more energetic, and living longer. These are all great benefits, but the benefit we are concerned with here is mental performance. As your body is able to metabolize nutrients more effectively, your entire body reaps the benefits — including your brain. As your physical ability goes up, so too does the ability of your brain.In case you are not familiar with how to exercise, a good exercise routine has two parts: aerobic training and resistance training.
- Aerobic training includes activities like running, biking, and other activities that require you to move fast. Aerobic activity is good for your heart health and lung health, training your body to oxygenate faster and more effectively. This results in a lower resting heart rate and feeling calmer when you are at rest.
- Resistance training includes activities like rock climbing, weightlifting, certain kinds of intense yoga, and any other activities which require you to place heavy loads on your muscles. Resistance training improves your muscle’s ability to bear a load, which affects how much you can lift, what you can climb, and how much impact your bones can handle. More strength means less energy burnt on basic activities, which means more energy for your brain.
4. Eat healthy foods
Just like how low-quality information breeds low-quality ideas, low-quality food breeds low-quality health… which breeds low-quality ideas. Garbage in, garbage out — so make sure you aren’t putting garbage in.I’m not just mindlessly harping on the importance of diet. The average person eats 2000 calories a day, and 300 to 400 of those calories are spent just powering your brain. If the 2000 calories you eat are garbage calories with no nutrients, your brain is starved of nutrients it needs to function properly. You aren’t going to have high-quality ideas if your brain can’t function.
I appreciate how difficult it can be to eat healthily. Sometimes I read self-help articles that say things like “it’s easy to eat healthily! All you have to do is spend an hour every morning cooking quinoa salad with fresh garden vegetables from scratch!” These make me want to pound my head into the wall. I, and many other people, struggle to make instant oatmeal in the morning, let alone start our day with “fresh quinoa salad.”
If you’re like me, here are some ways you can keep yourself fed with (reasonably) healthy food:
- Don’t buy snacks. Chips, Nutella, and other snack foods are the mortal enemies of a healthy diet. They have no nutritional value. They don’t fill you up, so you can eat 2000 calories in a single sitting. You can’t eat these foods if you don’t buy them, so don’t buy them.
- Don’t buy just-add-water food. Instant food is an MSG-laden nightmare. I looked at the ingredients list on my favorite brand of instant pho and just about had a heart attack.(The one exception I’ve found: oatmeal. Just-add-water oatmeal tends to have at least some protein and some whole grains.)
- Don’t eat fried food. If you’re going to get wings with friends, get the bone-in grilled wings instead of fried wings. Most of what’s unhealthy about American food is not the food itself, but the bread and grease we cover the food in.
- Buy some vitamins. Are vitamins sometimes poorly formulated and cut with filler ingredients? Yes. But even a poorly-formulated vitamin is better than no vitamins at all, and that’s where most Americans are at. Do yourself a favor and buy some gummy vitamins next time you’re at Walmart.
Following these guidelines doesn’t mean you’ll come up with the next Facebook. When it comes to creating world-changing things, having a good idea is just the first step. But following these guidelines does mean you’ll have a mind that’s sharp and ready to work every day, which is a damn fine foundation from which to start.
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