Care Deeply

Nobody ever said, “I want less breakthroughs.” Yet few understand where breakthroughs come from.

Here’s a useful model: Preparation—> Incubation—> Illumination—> Verification

In the psychology literature, the breakthrough is often referred to as the moment of “illumination.” Whether we acknowledge it explicitly, we are all seeking “illumination” on various problems we are facing: how to frame that discussion, how to close that deal, what subject line to use on that email, etc. We crave illumination.

What precedes the moment of illumination is a cognitive state of consideration, called “incubation.” I’m borderline-obsessed with the phenomenon, especially because it seems to have been given the short shrift these days; if it isn’t instantaneous, we aren’t interested. But breakthroughs are rarely automatic.

More often than not, they’re courted.

There are all sorts of fantastic tactics to facilitate incubation, many of which don’t feel much like work. And I love to talk about these, because they’re so counter-intuitive to our efficiency-loving cultures.

But here’s the catch: you don’t start with incubation. That would be silly. There’s an essential prerequisite to incubation: preparation. You have to frame the problem you’re trying to solve. One way to define preparation is care. For the methods of incubation to be of any value of you, you have to care about a problem.

As Paul Graham has said, “…Most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it.”

Our obsessions tend to get the extra cycles, whenever we have down time. They’re the problems that are primed for incubation.

How do you discover what problem you’ve been preparing to solve? A simple shower will do. Graham explains:

“I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.”

The shower test is an excellent heuristic.

Related: Redefine What’s Work
Related: Solve The Right Problem
Related: Drive Innovation Through Care
Related: Be Obsessed

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