How to come up with good ideas | Jim Keller and Lex Fridman

“You’re not along for the ride. You ARE the ride.” I almost forgot.

“Let it breathe, let it soak, & then put it to practice “ Sage advice

“You need to learn the language of your mind” spoken like a true engineer 👏🏻

Jim Keller you are a legend! Here's a bloke who sure, woke up one day with a mind possessed of great intellect, but he's done the work to explore it, determine its strengths and weaknesses and tweak his thinking with meta-cognition to both optimize it and create the brain he wants to work with. Few people ever exercise such deliberate control over their thinking processes. We are as a species very fortunate to count you as one of our number Jim. Thanks mate for all of your work and thoughts.

I totally dig the way the clip intro...enjoy the interesting interviews.

man you saved me when ı wanted to have meaninful and mattering talks with people but could not find anyone to talk with thank you brother

Great conversation on visualizations Lex! I ask people what their internal "calendar" looks like. This one varies a lot.

Ideas and thoughts become good and more useful/practical by constant learning from your past, anticipating the future while considering the situation/problem in hand. And of course respected those dedicated people who become the source of guidance and learning for others.

Wow that's some great clarity

I resonate a lot with these guests. YOU DEFINITELY GOTTA LET IT SIMMER A BIT. IVE BEEN DOING THIS GUITAR and music theory

'you need to learn the language of your own mind' incominggg...

Understanding is more important than memory.

03:11 I get that too...It's like the ideas present themselves to me out of nowhere on their own accord. Sometimes they're triggered by something external or internal and other times they are not triggered. It's like they just embedded themselves into my mind. I guess that's just bottom up processes of the brain... I don't visualise and I'm terrible with numbers. When I do come up with an idea it is initiated by a bottom up synthesis where I see the bigger picture but the details are blurred. The difficult part is the top down analysis. That requires great effort. Whereas the ideas kind of just all come to me one by one over an extended period of time as they please without any deliberate prompting from me. Although I don't prompt them it seems that the top down thinking certainly creates this perpetual reemergence of the problem in a bottom up manner later on. For me, the synthesis part seems to involve a lot of systems thinking intuition and the association of ideas. But the association is often very abstract or subtle and difficult to explain... but tangible in some way. Sometimes it's a concept which has already been written about in the academic literature which I am unfamiliar with until I begin researching but I can already see. I just see the bigger picture and don't know how to explain it until hindsight. Now I'm just riding that wave so to speak. It is quite validating and empowering when all the parts start to come together and you realise you were really onto something big...

I was never one of those people who could cram the night before. My mind operates in a manner similar to the guest. As an engineering major, I felt that being tasked with learning so many concepts in such a short duration was done purposely to weed out those who could not handle the pace. I adapted by changing my approach of learning, honestly learning how to learn effectively from the top students in my classes. A very humbling experience

Jim just became one of my favorites because of this segment. I listened to the first half of his episode and understood little of the details but it kind of made sense. Point blank on the process of mind though

What? This guy's brother in law is Jordan Peterson? Awesome

PSU EE for life 🤝

Oooooo I member having dreams of pointers... back in college way way back...

I practice coming up with ideas, and if I don't see a picture of something that satisfies me immediately, I store it rather than forcing more out and eventually a few years down the line I come up with a way to complete it. If I'm talking, it's immediate, but I consider my best ideas to be products of years of experiments. When you're trying to make something linear, start immediately, if its a lateral thought, sit with it. Turning a lateral thought experiment into a linear process is not my strong suit though. I get too stuck into wanting to lateralize again. The world seems to like linear processing more, whereas being lateral seems far more interesting, and let's you make entirely new things, but arguing to linear people to start along a new linear vertical which you've achieved laterally seems like it would be difficult the first time, but a piece of cake after that.

I had a problem a while back, thought about it a lot then forgot about it. 5 years later the solution just jumped into my head.