“Bag of Tricks” meets “Menu of Problems”

These two phrases are lovingly borrowed from a brilliant friend, Andy York, who uses this language to describe two critical parts of the inventive process. A commonality for people who are good at inventing things is that they have loaded into memory a good set of both problems and solutions. Many people who are evidently extremely smart (to unfairly pick on two archetypes, lets call these failure modes “Academics” and “Entrepreneurs”), only seem to specialize in one of these sides and suffer from that.

Why? Your probability to recognize the right tool to solve the right problem scales with the edges, not the nodes. In a two-sided network like this, the cheapest way to expand edges is to add nodes to the side you’re weakest on. The entrepreneur who knows market problems deeply may be best served by spending the time understanding the available tools, and the academic may benefit from learning who the end users are of their outputs.

While we’re on the subject of maximizing the odds that you’ll invent something good.

• Working with new tools, or on new problems, increases the odds that simply no one else has touched these problems before, and perhaps some of the easiest, most superficial connections will yield big results disproportionate to your effort. I’m a bit conflicted on whether these are “cheap calories” of some sort — after all, the apparent nature of these connections may mean that, if not for you, the same discovery would have been made independently by someone else a few months later. This is most commonly a side effect of bandwagoning in the middle of a big hype cycle, when a huge set of smart people pile in to a small space of ideas at the same time. You’ll make a bigger difference (and have more breathing room to operate) if you’re less hyped.
• Get in the hours. The more hours you’re thinking about the problem, the more times you’re consciously or unconsciously comparing problems and solutions, or revolving the problem and thinking about it from a fresh angle. Sustained attention to a problem over days (particularly, going to bed right after thinking about a problem) also helps I think in the process of fully ingesting the idea.