Ideas often arrive slowly and serendipitously, but not without work, openness, and the ability to recognize when disparate parts add up to something great and when they do not.
Great ideas are brief at their core.
They sound or look stupid at first.
They are what remains after everything removable has been removed.
They are held in place by what they must account for.
They solve several separate problems as one.
They reveal that a constraint everyone had stopped noticing was optional.
They solve a narrow thing well but also cover things they were not designed for.
They rule things out.
They can survive bad execution when intuition is sound.
They are often neither realized in reality nor perceived through the senses.
They come to those who witness the character of existence.
And they keep yielding more than anyone expected.
Rare and hard-won, a truly great idea is a deceptively simple distillation of insight that reveals hidden constraints, resolves several problems as one, reaches beyond its original purpose, and keeps yielding more than anyone expected.