I still get the impression that everything I write is boring and obvious and millions of people before me have experienced it. After reading this text, I decided to return to my old notes and see if anything had changed :) Thank you.
Weird example, but I think I ran into a version of this a while back while making Portal puzzles. If you haven't played Portal, it's a first-person puzzle game based around creating "portals" that warp you from one point to another, which is non-intuitive enough that figuring out how to do things that way is interesting and satisfying.
Anyway, the 2nd game had a puzzle-creator built in, so you could make up your own Portal puzzles, and I started playing around with it. Eventually after a few small-to-medium sized puzzles I decided to get ambitious and work on a really big one. So I did, starting out with a novel (to me at least) way of using the portal mechanic that I hadn't seen in the original games. After a couple hours of working on it I took a step back and thought "This is way too obvious, I need to make everything more difficult," so I did. A couple hours later: "No, still too obvious. More difficulty." Rinse and repeat.
Finally I showed it to my roommate, who couldn't even get past the first stage. I was like "No it's easy, look, you just do this and this and this and..." He gave me a look of absolute withering contempt and walked out of the room.
I rediscovered the puzzle again recently, several years after building it. Even though I remembered the basic principles that it was built on, it still took me like 6 hours to solve it. I don't think it was that obvious after all.
Many such cases! And good point in that last paragraph: something can become non-obvious to us as we change and forget things. In fact that happens all the time, and it's all the more good reason to be careful when assuming obviousness for others.
Absolutely love the simple truth of this - what a great perspective to share. It lights the fire under all my ideas sitting in my notebooks or tossed to the compost pile of ideas.
I'm going to basically have to disagree with #1. I mean fine share the idea, but who cares whether somebody else already had it or not.
We are not in a idea contest are we? Who cares who had the idea first - if an idea has merit, then why not share it for its own sake and truly nobody owns an idea alone because if an idea don't resonate nobody will care about it in the first place. So, the best ideas are out there for discourse and it is a good idea to share ideas and not feel any desire for credit, but rather to share the idea for the sake of the idea itself. Then, to take this logic to the end, if the idea resonates it does and if it don't it don't, and if it don't odds are it wasn't a good idea in the first place - you know?
Oh my god I feel like everything I write is obvious thank you so much for writing this
I think this essay has helped quite a few people now and I’m really glad 🙂
Thanks! This has convinced me to write all those essay ideas out in more detail instead of leaving them to rot in my notes file. Great rules.
This is reassuring. Thanks for this!
I still get the impression that everything I write is boring and obvious and millions of people before me have experienced it. After reading this text, I decided to return to my old notes and see if anything had changed :) Thank you.
Weird example, but I think I ran into a version of this a while back while making Portal puzzles. If you haven't played Portal, it's a first-person puzzle game based around creating "portals" that warp you from one point to another, which is non-intuitive enough that figuring out how to do things that way is interesting and satisfying.
Anyway, the 2nd game had a puzzle-creator built in, so you could make up your own Portal puzzles, and I started playing around with it. Eventually after a few small-to-medium sized puzzles I decided to get ambitious and work on a really big one. So I did, starting out with a novel (to me at least) way of using the portal mechanic that I hadn't seen in the original games. After a couple hours of working on it I took a step back and thought "This is way too obvious, I need to make everything more difficult," so I did. A couple hours later: "No, still too obvious. More difficulty." Rinse and repeat.
Finally I showed it to my roommate, who couldn't even get past the first stage. I was like "No it's easy, look, you just do this and this and this and..." He gave me a look of absolute withering contempt and walked out of the room.
I rediscovered the puzzle again recently, several years after building it. Even though I remembered the basic principles that it was built on, it still took me like 6 hours to solve it. I don't think it was that obvious after all.
Many such cases! And good point in that last paragraph: something can become non-obvious to us as we change and forget things. In fact that happens all the time, and it's all the more good reason to be careful when assuming obviousness for others.
I don’t think this is particularly worth watching but it was what popped into my head so ... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ePyOsgkzg
Absolutely love the simple truth of this - what a great perspective to share. It lights the fire under all my ideas sitting in my notebooks or tossed to the compost pile of ideas.
I'm going to basically have to disagree with #1. I mean fine share the idea, but who cares whether somebody else already had it or not.
We are not in a idea contest are we? Who cares who had the idea first - if an idea has merit, then why not share it for its own sake and truly nobody owns an idea alone because if an idea don't resonate nobody will care about it in the first place. So, the best ideas are out there for discourse and it is a good idea to share ideas and not feel any desire for credit, but rather to share the idea for the sake of the idea itself. Then, to take this logic to the end, if the idea resonates it does and if it don't it don't, and if it don't odds are it wasn't a good idea in the first place - you know?