From his Nobel talk slides:
The meaning of the first one was not immediately apparent to me, so I found a longer version of the rules, where Krugman explains: “Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language.”
Applies to many, many things.
From MAKE: Blog: Neal Stephenson Answers Our Questions:
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers, in their cubicles waiting to have that ‘big idea’ for the next great novel?
Just keep writing. The big mistake is to write something and then stop for a long time while you try to sell it. Don’t ever stop. If you stop, you get out of practice. And writing is like cabinet making or soccer playing, it’s all about practice.
I just put together a series of pretty successful brainstorms — good work, happy designers, lots of deep thinking that is continuing even after the pitch it was for. One of the keys to the success, at least in my mind, was that the brief was (brief and was) presented a day in advance of the actual brainstorm. The second key was that there were subsequent brainstorm sessions. Grokking new ideas takes time, re-aligning thinking requires unconscious and conscious work, and concepts take hold at deeper levels and in parts before bubbling up in an expressable form.
My piano teacher gave me a student assignment book (I could never keep track of what I was supposed to do) and the little note in the front seemed in line with my recent ‘no silver bullets’, ‘no acts of divine inspiration’ ‘creativity is a habit’ screeding:
I blogged this before, emphasizing 1) break it down; 2) master the components and add it together; 3) clean it up & go deeper; 4) make it sing.