How to have ideas

What you'll take away

1. 01

   Good ideas come from semantic distance: a sparse, idiosyncratic human mind connects a question to unlikely places, while an LLM reaches for the nearest, most obvious answer.

2. 02

   Five concrete habits for better ideas: hold a specific question in mind, look for an idea rather than the idea, go look at the actual thing you're counting, follow detours, and let yourself walk away from a problem.

3. 03

   The real risk of delegating thinking to AI isn't losing the ability to reason — it's settling for the first answer that looks good enough instead of pushing for a better one.