Have you ever had a flood of ideas? By a FLOOD of ideas, I mean at least 3-4 ideas that are seemingly really interesting to you. Most of the ideas that occur to you initially end up not working (or not being worthy of spending time on); at least this is how it’s been for me. There are certain moments that one idea leads to another, and that one leads to another, and so on, until you land onto THE ONE. In certain moments, you initially get multiple ideas, but then after some time they merge to one idea. In other moments, you may have a single idea initially, but it may branch to multiple ideas.

The image above illustrates linear progression of ideas on the top (first level) and bottom part (fourth level) of the idea chain, branching from the first level to the second level, merging from the third to the fourth level, and both branch and merging from the second level to the third level. Out of the 11 ideas that you have thought of, it is highly likely that the 11th idea will be the one to spend most of your time on, compared to all the others that came before it. Of course there will be times when you will go back to previous ideas and maybe you will bring some of your old ideas to the frontline, but this is only after spending so much time on your last (version of) idea.

People call this brainstorming. I would like to introduce new concept: brainstormed. This word is for people who are constantly in a brainstorming mode. They just cannot help themselves. One thought after another keeps them actually distracted from the good ideas that they get once in a while. This sounds bad, but I guess we cannot help ourselves sometimes. You know, now I write about this stuff, it reminded of so many CS projects that I have started but not finished, as well as the writing process of my two books that I have shared on this website: A Student’s C Book I and A Student’s Computer Architecture Book I. I one-handedly wrote these two books in a “one sitting”: not too much thought or time was poured to writing or polishing the contents of the books. This obviously lowers the quality of the content that I produce, meaning that they could be way better than they are now if I were to just spend another couple of months on them at least.

Some people are brainstorming for an hour, some people walk brainstormed days or even weeks. It may seem like we are always after “quick wins”, and maybe we are, but I think it might be deeper than this. It sometimes feels like a joy of being able to prove to yourself that you can do it. You rush in the process of doing whatever you are doing because you want to get challenged by something in the process; you want to encounter that part fast. Doing the things you know over and over again is very boring. It is the kick of the challenge that gets you going sometimes. Now that this post becomes too long and boring, I need to go do something else.