Paul Graham: Banal and Breakthrough

September 2017

The most valuable ideas are both banal and breakthrough. For example, F = ma. But this is quite difficult to achieve. This territory is usually cleaned up, precisely because these ideas are so valuable.

Usually, the best thing that people can do is do one without the other: either breakthrough, but non-trivial ideas (for example, gossip), or well-known, but not surprising ideas (for example, platitudes).
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Interesting things start to happen when moderate insights appear. This can be achieved by adding a little bit of what was missing. The most common case is to add a bit of banality: a piece of gossip that becomes more than just gossip when she tells something interesting about the world. A less common approach is to focus on commonplace ideas and see if you can tell something new about them. Due to the fact that the information is initially fairly generalized, it is enough to add only a little novelty to get a useful idea.

A small amount of novelty is all you will get most of the time. This means that if you go this way, your ideas will seem in many ways similar to existing ones. Sometimes you will realize that you simply rediscovered an idea that already existed. But do not be discouraged. Remember the huge multiplier that increases each time you think about something even slightly new.

Moral: the more generalized are the ideas you are talking about, the less you should worry about repeating yourself. If you write enough, repetitions cannot be avoided. Your brain remains the same from year to year, like the insights that visit it. I feel a little ill when I discover that I have said something similar to what I have said before, as if I was splashing myself. But if you think rationally, then this is not worth it. You do not say something exactly as you did last time, and this change increases the chance that you will receive this tiny, but critically necessary percentage of novelty.

And, of course, ideas generate ideas. (This sounds familiar.) An idea with a small percentage of novelty can lead to an idea in which this percentage will be much higher. But only if you continue to do this. So it is doubly important not to lose heart when people will argue that there is not much new in what you discover. “Not so much new” is a good achievement when you talk about more generalized ideas. Perhaps if you continue to do this, you will find more cool ideas.

It is said that "nothing is new under the Moon." This is not true. There are some domains where there is almost nothing new. But there is a big difference between “nothing new” and “ALMOST nothing new” in the scope of this activity.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison and Jessica Livingston for reading the drafts of this article.