Where Do My Ideas Come From? Part 2: Information Diet
You are what you eat. It’s the same thing for the information you consume.
How do I consume information?
I read a lot.
I read far and wide. I’ll let Ray Bradbury explain this one:
“I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes.”
I read different mediums. I’m medium agnostic in that I believe great ideas are present everywhere irrespective of how the information is presented. As such, I read everything from books, blogs, short stories, essays, children’s books, comics, academic papers, etc.
I find that this builds a network of ideas. The beauty of it is eventually the ideas begin to intersect. And once they start to intersect I start to come up with new ideas I would’ve not gotten otherwise.