I was wondering what time do people get their great ideas. I will start I could’t fall asleep last night and had a great idea for my robot at 1:59 AM. Does this happen to you guys?
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“Most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful. And more often than not, that missing element is somewhere else, living as another hunch in another person’s head. Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete ideas.”
- Steven Johnson
Where do Good Ideas Come From
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In the shower. Most of the time
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I live with a family of 5 people, so it’s hard to think with all the disruptions, so I generally find peace and quiet whenever I want to think. For example, in mornings when I am taking a shower, or before I go to bed when it’s night. Sometimes I stay up late when everyone else is asleep to give myself plenty of time to plan and iterate what to do the next day.
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In my experience the best way to solve problems is to introduce yourself to the problem, take a crack at it, and then put it away in the back of your mind for a while. Do something unrelated to the problem to distract yourself, and a solution will come eventually. In general tho my best ideas come between 1am-4am. I’m usually reading or gaming up until then, and when I get bored of whatever I’m doing a solution will come. No clue why but it works
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This is the main source of my ideas. I have a hard time falling asleep and so I like to make use of that time to brainstorm ideas that may seem wild and crazy and refine them until they make sense. I have a 1 hour commute to school so I also get ideas when I am driving to and from school when there is nothing else to think about. Really whenever I am doing an activity that requires little thought, ideas will start to fill the empty space in my mind.
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Wait you guys get great ideas?
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I usually get my great ideas while I am working on one of 50 other incomplete great ideas.
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Usually in my spare time i sit down in my room and just mess around with some parts until i get an idea. Other times i just get them.
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With a pen/pencil and paper in my hands but writing nothing
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Laying down on the carpet after attempting to fix a build issue to no avail, I look to my left and I chill there for however long it takes for an idea to come.
This is also the reason my skin is garbage on the right side of my face(the side laying into the carpet).
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Sometimes I may carelessly slap items together and see if it works, then I build off of it until I realized I’ve built something cool and unique without knowing it.
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Pretty Much by thinking of the dumbest ideas until one of them is dumb enough that it might work. Then while building said dumb idea, you realize that you can actually make a great idea from it
PS: Around 2:00 AM
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At night. It definitely has it’s toll on my sleep.
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Immediately after leaving school (after robotics)
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I will get some ideas at the randomest of times. Mainly at night when I can’t sleep. But sometimes I will consult this futuristic engine called google. It aids me in coming up with great ideas by showing me something called pictures and also sometimes videos. I highly suggest the use of this futuristic piece of technology.
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In the past season, I got most ideas for the robot in class just staring off into the distance.
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In the middle of the night. Put a pad and pencil next to your bed. Think about your problem as you fall asleep, but say “Write neatly” every so often.
I wake up with weird stuff some mornings, sometimes blanks. Sometimes it’s useless. One day it said x=2. No idea, but I had been working a programming problem, so I thought about it. Next day it said x=2 again. Still no idea. Thought all day, finally said to my code partner x=2. And he went to the inner search, made it x=2 and it worked. So now I fall asleep with saying “write neatly, use your words”. YMWV 
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For robotics, usually around the 12-4 AM range. For everything else, usually 9-11 PM.
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You guys sleep20202029
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