Our best ideas tend to come to us unannounced. We might be going for a walk, we might be taking a shower, we might be playing with our children, maybe we're out for coffee. The best ideas seem to come to us kind of in the moment and not a moment where we are working on the task that the idea might be useful for something unrelated. Typically we're in a very natural environment. I know walking. This occurs to me a lot. I like to go for relatively long walks and I never regret doing it.
The contemplation that I do during that walk always ends up serving me very well in life. I get a lot of ideas, I get solutions that come to me. It might be something, a problem I was working on in a piece of software, and I struggled in the moment and I couldn't get it. And then, for whatever reason, when I'm not even thinking of software, I might be thinking of something else.
And there's an analogical connection, maybe between something I'm comprehending and then, or contemplating rather, and the problem within the software. And I see this tight connection and all of a sudden it's revealed to me and it's kind of that almost odd, funny feeling when you go back to the problem and you solve it within, let's say, a few minutes, and yet you may have been struggling with it for hours. How did it go from hours to just a few minutes? It's amazing.
And what happened in that gap in between? Because I wasn't working on the problem and yet something coalesced in the mind. This mind has this amazing automatic way to bring together the most salient points. It sheds a lot of the superfluous stuff that we might otherwise be focused on.
Because when we're focused on the task at hand, we don't really know what isn't as important, but we tend to think we do, and we go down a lot of wrong paths, and you have to walk away from that, you have to step outside that problem. You have to shed a lot of the maybe superfluous stuff that wasn't needed, but that you didn't know was superfluous at the time.
And maybe more to the point, you have to kind of coalesce those different pieces of information into some kind of synthesis that ends up representing the solution. And I think most of us can relate to the fact that this seems to occur. That kind of almost final piece, or at least that really good idea or solution, tends to come to us very unannounced. We don't know when it's going to happen.
But it's often when we're not on the task itself, again, going for a walk, maybe in the shower, playing with our children, going for coffee, maybe you're even watching a movie. I mean, it just. Something clicks in those moments. But in a way, this shouldn't really be that surprising. I think the environment can trigger things in us and force us to see things in a different perspective.
If you are going for that walk or even watching a movie or playing with your child, whatever it is, it's this different environment. It's multifaceted. There's a different energy to that environment. And I think that energy is kind of brought to our mind and forces us, without us really knowing it, to kind of take a different perspective of things and find analogies between different ideas and something that is just not available.
This kind of thing would not be available to us, say, in a silent room. I had that tweet recently where I said a silent room invites one to focus on unnecessary details. But a busy surrounding leaves room only for what matters. Immerse yourself in the inconstancy of life. The energy and focus are free. And this is not to say that there isn't a time and place to go in that quiet room and to focus on the problem, you need to be working on the problem itself.
But there's something about a busy surrounding where you're interacting with people, or even if you're just going for a walk, but you're looking at kind of the fractal aspect of nature and the immense complexity and the patterns and just things that don't directly have anything to do with your work, but that are kind of triggering things in you. They're giving you ideas, they're allowing thoughts to coalesce in the mind.
And I think that environment can kind of feed into your mind in a way that triggers a lot of really good realizations, that brings together information in a way that is highly useful. And so there's a real kind of utility to doing things like being distracted, going for a walk, taking a break, hanging out with people, doing things that have nothing directly to do with the task at hand. So I think it's important to realize that our best ideas often come when we're not on the problem.
Right, when we're doing other things, things that are seemingly completely unrelated to the tasks that we do need to accomplish on a daily basis or the project that we're working on, the problems that we're trying to solve. But because of this, it means that when we do sit down to do the actual work. We are missing a lot of the original inspiration and energy in the solution.
More to the point, we're missing the same information content that we had in the moment, which was contained in, say, the feeling that we had. If I'm going for the walk and something kind of arises in my mind, and it kind of materializes as this solution, as this thought. You rarely would be able to necessarily articulate that particularly well in the moment because it's kind of more of a feeling. You kind of have this realization. Maybe you're visualizing it, you can kind of see it.
And it's almost like if you could run back to your computer right away or jot something down, if you had a pen on you, you'd be able to capture this idea, this realization in the moment. And sometimes you can just, oh, I realize what the solution is. And so next time I'm sitting down, I'll do it. But often the ideas, these realizations that come to us are something that we should use, we should use in our life, we should use in a project.
It should be in a story that we tell, an application that we're building, a group that we're putting together, whatever it is we're creating in life. These really salient, important realizations should not be fleeting.
It seems like they're so important and necessary and at times profound that there's this kind of gap between when that happens, which is largely unannounced, and when we're not on the problem, and when we could really use it, which is when we are working on problems and we're putting things into place. So, again, I think our best ideas often come unannounced when we're not working on the problem.
And really, that's not that surprising, because the environment that we're in, when we're just being natural and we're interacting with nature and our people, it can trigger things in us. It can force us to see things in a different perspective. And there's an energy to that that I think is just commensurate with how the human mind works. And I think that's why things tend to coalesce and precipitate out in a very salient way and a profound way in those moments.
But what this means is that when we are on the clock or when you are actually doing the work, you're no longer in that environment, you're not in that moment. And maybe when you had that big realization, it was yesterday. It was a week ago. It was two weeks ago. And so now, there's this gap between when you could use the utility, the usefulness of that profound insight. There's a gap between that and when it actually occurred.
And I think when you go to sit down and do the work, you could always say, well, I kind of remember what I was thinking, and so maybe I'll just think about it again. Usually you kind of remember maybe what came to you, but you then try to articulate it, or you try to get it down on paper, or whatever it is you're building, creating, doing in life, or even just trying to implement it as a new behavior. Let's say, when it comes to you, when it's useful, it's not really the same.
You've lost something. It's kind of a bastardized version of whatever it is you were feeling when you had it in the moment. And I think it's realistic to say that we cannot be expected to recapture that real feeling at a later time. Because we're just no longer in the moment. We're not in that environment. We're not getting triggered in a good way the way we were.
By experiencing the complexity of nature around us, or the kind of multifaceted interaction that we have with people, or whatever it is that was kind of feeding energy and allowing our mind to do what it most naturally does. We're just not there anymore. And to try to recapture that is, in many ways unrealistic. And I imagine a lot of listeners can relate to this. When I thought of that thing, it really made sense to me. It was in the moment.
I thought, this is definitely the solution, or, this is definitely the way forward. And then a day or two or a week goes by, and now is your moment to try to call upon that insight, to use it, to put it into the thing you're building. Or there's a situation arising where this particular behavior would be beneficial, or whatever it is, and it's not the same. Attempting to articulate a feeling that occurred days, weeks, or months prior. Leaves us with a dry version of what we realized at the time.
And there's even a decent chance that we articulate it incorrectly altogether. Often we can kind of recapture some of it, but often we might try to. Our mind is in a completely different place now. We go to put it into play, put it into the thing that we're building. Behavior that we're trying to take on whatever it is we're doing, the usefulness, and it just doesn't even look the same. Maybe we're not even getting it right at all. This time and again.
I think that's because when realizations come to us, they come to us as more of a feeling than anything. And so I think we have to realize that there's something to be said for capturing our work in the moment. I think that if there were a way to grab on and capture those insights when they occur, that that could really, really benefit our work in dramatic ways.
And arguably, there would be a much better way if you could do this, to do a lot of your work, which would be kind of more by accumulation, where if you could keep capturing it in the moment, capturing it in the moment, and then when you really needed to call upon something, you could go take the accumulation of what has been captured over time and use that.
And even though it's difficult to articulate whatever realization came to you because you captured it in the moment, it's got that far better context. It's got the richness of information to it. It hasn't been stripped of the context. It's not as bastardized as trying to do it the next day, week, month only. The moment has all the pieces we need, and it's kind of ultimately an unspoken thing. It's more like a feeling.
But if you attempt to articulate it in that moment, then you would grab on to a lot more of what you need. It would be far more authentic, far more real, a far better solution. And I argue that this would dramatically and does dramatically enhance the quality of one's work. But this is kind of the big challenge, because we're saying, one our best ideas, I think we can relate to this, come unannounced. It's not when we're working, it's not when we're capturing something.
We're walking, we're taking a shower, or we're playing with our kids, we're going to the coffee shop. It's not about work, it's not about writing things down. It's not about capturing anything. We're just living. And that's a key part of having the best revelations in life, is to be doing that very organic, multifaceted, real living.
But it means that when we do sit down to do the actual work, now there's this big distance or gap between the work that we're doing and when that insight arrived at us, and we're always trying to kind of recapture some of those good ideas, we're not in the moment anymore. We don't have the same quality of information. We don't have the context.
And so I think the big challenge is we need to capture our work in the moment, okay, somehow we need to capture it in the moment so that most of the work is done not when we just sit down in the task, but just by accumulating those very natural moments through life, it would capture the context, it would be more authentic.
And it dramatically, I argue, increases the quality of our work and makes things a lot easier, actually, because now you don't have to fight so hard to try to recapture the insight. You don't have to fight so hard to try to get the right articulation. And because of the way it accumulated in those very natural moments, you end up having most of the work done already by the time you go to actually kind of package it or put it into something that you release to the world.
And so the example, kind of the analogy is this term in situ. And this kind of just means something that's in its natural place. And if we think of different industries that have noticed this all in different areas of life where people are solving problems and they've noticed the power of doing something in situ, I think this is a good example, and it highlights the importance of capturing things in context.
So, for example, the aerospace industry, the equipment on board the aircraft tends to be tested in situ or in place. And the reason why they do this is to confirm everything functions properly as a system. Okay? So we tend to as humans and just kind of as a byproduct of the paradigm of science and engineering that we're in right now. It's very kind of reductionist. We think of things as components.
And so you might think, well, if I'm going to test this piece of onboard equipment, maybe navigation or this black box or this window switch, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. You might say, well, just test it kind of in isolation. Take it out, put it in the lab, make sure that it has the pieces and achieves the movement in a kind of a sterile in lab test. And then if it does, then just plug the component in at a later date. But everything is connected to everything else.
And you have to understand things as a holistic, in context system. And so the best way in the aerospace industry to test equipment on board is to test it in situ, is to have the window in place or the black box in place or the navigation Equipment installed in the equipment, sorry, on board the actual full aircraft, and test it that way. Archaeology is another good example. In situ means that the artifact has not been moved from its original place of deposition.
So the place where they found it in archaeology, and this is critical to the interpretation of the artifact. It's critical to developing an understanding of the culture that formed it. An artifact that is not discovered in situ is considered out of context and not providing an accurate picture of the culture that's associated with that artifact. So again, there is this massive advantage to leaving something in its natural place.
It's connected to all the core dependencies that that thing depends on in ways that we don't know, in ways that we'll never know, but we understand as a property the critical importance of context. And that's why you do things in situ. In situ art refers to any art that takes into account the site in which it's installed or exhibited. Okay, so it's not just, yeah, I'm going to go commission someone for a piece of art.
You go back to your studio and you make it, and then you come back, and then we'll install it somewhere. You might paint it where it's going to be installed or somehow take into account where that's going to be exhibited within the painting itself. Because it's not just the painting itself. It's the context in which that painting sits that's critical in biology. In situ means to examine the phenomenon exactly in place where it occurs.
You can imagine, like any other science, there's a lot of isolation, there's a lot of extraction. Take the piece out, take it to the lab, study it there. What's the most important pattern here? What's the most important structure? And while there's some importance to that, nothing can compare to understanding the phenomenon in the place where it occurs. Because the demarcation that we make in science between this phenomenon that we're looking at and its environment is a bit false.
It's a bit contrived. It's a mental abstraction that we do where we say, this is the octopus and this is the ocean. And those are two very different things. Well, in reality, the octopus doesn't really have much of a definition outside the ocean. Its shape, its form, its behavior critically depends on being in the ocean. We create the demarcation. Not that there isn't a real demarcation there, but that's ultimately a mental abstraction.
If you really want to study the phenomena, it should be where it is, because it's critically and interdependently connected to its environment. In chemistry, in situ means a chemical intermediate that is synthesized within a process in its natural place, rather than being isolated first. So this might be done because maybe the species is unstable and it can't be isolated. Or maybe it's just more convenient.
But there are critical chemical structures that only exist within the full chemical process itself. If you tried to extract it and isolate it and just study it on its own, it might not be possible, or you wouldn't get the same understanding. In architecture, insitu refers to if you do construction and you carry the construction out at the building site, as opposed to using a bunch of prefabricated pieces and then bringing them to the construction site.
So just kind of using the materials that are there and building it there. There's a reason to do that. I'm not saying this is always done, but there is a time and place for that. And there can be a huge advantage in computer science. As a final example, in situ means that you have an operation that occurs without interrupting the normal state of the system. So, for example, you might be doing a file backup, and that might be restored while the system is running.
So you don't require the system to be shut down during the backup. So anyway, aerospace, archaeology, art, biology, chemistry, architecture, computer science, these are examples of a range of different fields and different challenges that people work on. And in all these kind of disparate areas, they have noticed the major advantage that comes from studying something in situ. And I think we should understand why that makes sense. Again, let's just go back as a recap.
Our best ideas come unannounced. We're in the real environment. We're walking, taking a shower, playing with children, we're going for coffee, we're talking to people, we're interacting, messy, organic, analog, not working on the problem, not focusing our mind, in some sense, very distracted. And if we be honest with ourselves, really, so many of our best ideas come in those moments.
But this means that when we do go sit down to do real work, which we have to do, we're now disconnected from those real moments. We don't have that context anymore. We don't have that same inspiration and energy that gave us that critical insight. And there really is a big difference. You can try to recapture it. You can try to articulate what you felt day two week ago. It's just not the same. And so I think the big challenge in life is not to just say, well, that's too bad.
If only we could capture the moment. I think it's something that we need to do. We do need to capture the work in the moment, because the quality of what we understand, the quality of the revelation in the moment, is far superior to anything that we do. When we try to reconstitute that at a later date, far more authentic. It's far more in context. It's got those critical pieces that need to be there that allow something to really be understood.
And if we could capture it in the moment, I think we could better articulate in that moment what it is we're feeling and what it is that is kind of the truth of the situation. I gave analogies, which, of course, are never just analogies. They're core patterns that relate analogically for a reason. Right, but aerospace, archaeology, biology, chemistry, art, there's a reason to study things in context. So what can we do? What is a technique we can use?
What is something tangible we can do in our lives to actually capture things in the moment? Well, I think this is actually where technology comes into play. The nice thing about today's technology is it's quite different from most of the technology since the industrial revolution. Now we have smartphones and voice recognition and artificial intelligence.
And what makes these technologies so different is they're actually far more organic and mobile and arguably human than something like a steam engine or rocket engine or a train or anything like that. We're not dealing with overly mechanical technology anymore. These are highly intuitive interfaces, easy to hold, easy to use. I don't even have to type anymore. I can recognize my voice.
And this type of technology, because of its more human nature, is actually quite amenable to capturing things in the moment. So thanks to technologies like the Internet, smartphones, and AI, we can capture things in the moment like never before. Right? Obviously, the Internet means we have access for the most part, regardless of where we are, often even being in the bush or going for a walk, being on the trail, we can get access to things right away.
But the smartphone, even more to the point, really allows us to capture things because often we don't even need to connect to the right, we just need a device to capture it. And AI, which really kind of brings us full circle, as I like to say, back to technology, meeting us where we are, as opposed to us trying to lower ourselves to the technology.
AI is a very organic, closer to natural type of technology because we can use things like voice recognition to simply speak into our device and capture what we're thinking. We don't have to slow down, we don't have to type. We don't have to get to a quiet environment. We don't have to. I mean, it might need to be a little bit more quiet, but we can really just grab a device right then, right there, and capture what we're thinking.
And I think as the amount that we collect increases over time organically. That's a much better way to accumulate the work that we need to do. And then when we go to implement it in the real world, on our projects, on our tasks, on our behaviors, we can then think about how to structure it and how to separate it. The difference being that we're not trying to recapture something from a while back. We're not trying to force a bastardized version of this kind of sterile, stripped take on something.
We've got the original essence of what we're thinking. We can articulate the feeling in the moment, and we have a bunch of those gathered up, and we can bring those to the task at hand. Right? So I think technology today, what's really nice about it is you can be anywhere in the world. You can have the Internet, you can have the smartphone, you can use voice recognition, you can very easily and organically rapidly capture a lot of what you're thinking.
You might not want to use voice recognition. Maybe you don't mind text kind of using your thumbs and typing it. The point is, the barrier should be as small as possible. It should be very easy to do. It should be nothing for you to kind of whip something out and capture it. And I think there's a huge advantage to doing that. Again, our best ideas come unannounced in those organic, real world situations, not when we're working.
But that does mean that when we sit down to do actual work, we're now separate from that in context, authentic realization that we had, and we need to somehow capture things in the moment so that our work is authentic, grows by accumulation, and captures that critical context. There's a huge difference in quality in communicating what we know or realize in the moment compared to what we try to recapture later.
We saw the advantages of in situ studies and tests in aerospace and archaeology and art, biology, chemistry, architecture, computer science. And I said, look, using today's technology is a great way to just capture things in the moment. And so I encourage you to not just have a thought when you're going for the walk, might be a little bit harder in the shower, but not just when you're talking to people or have kind of a fleeting thought in your head and leave it at that.
Don't just leave it at that. Try to capture it quickly. Maybe just take out your smartphone and you speak into it really quickly and let that build up over time, accumulate your in context realizations, accumulate what's natural, let that be your work, then just structure and distill it later. But have the original realization that you had in the moment. And that's going to lead to far more authentic, genuine, and higher quality work down the road. Okay, that's it for this episode.
Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.