The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.
Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
A 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity
How do people get new ideas?
Presumably,
the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in
all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form,
a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors.
We are most interested in the “creation” of a new scientific principle
or a new application of an old one, but we can be general here.
One
way of investigating the problem is to consider the great ideas of the
past and see just how they were generated. Unfortunately, the method of
generation is never clear even to the “generators” themselves.
But what if the
same earth-shaking idea occurred to two men, simultaneously and
independently? Perhaps, the common factors involved would be
illuminating. Consider the theory of evolution by natural selection,
independently created by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.
There
is a great deal in common there. Both traveled to far places, observing
strange species of plants and animals and the manner in which they
varied from place to place. Both were keenly interested in finding an
explanation for this, and both failed until each happened to read
Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”
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