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How your best work might come from getting away from work

Good ideas are hard to come by, but I find I’m often looking in the wrong places.

When I’m trying to develop new ideas, sitting at my desk staring at my computer (and all the world’s distractions) seems to be the worst place. Instead, I like to prime my mind by writing down whatever thoughts I have on the topic and then trying to ruminate as I go about life.

I’m inspired by stories of brilliant people coming up with ideas at surprising times:

• Hirotugu Akaike said the idea for his eponymous Akaike Information Criterion while taking his seat on the bus.
• Grant Wood, most famous for painting American Gothic, once said “All the really good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”
• Stanisław Ulam, a key physicist in the Manhattan Project, recounted how he thought of Monte Carlo methods while home sick and playing solitaire. (Monte Carlo methods essential in modern artificial intelligence model training!)
• Paul Dirac, a founder of quantum mechanics, said, “I would like to mention that I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state.”

Of course, this method can be abused. I had a classmate in grad school who used to use “you can’t force inspiration” as an excuse to never do any work. I try to balance these anecdotes with Stephen King’s proverb: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”