I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

All the books that I've written about breakthrough ideas follow a completely different pattern,

which I called years ago, I called the Slow Hunch, which is instead of a light bulb moment

or an aha moment, you get this inkling that there's something worth exploring or some idea out there.

You don't really know why, you don't know why you're obsessed with this, but you're drawn into it.

And it's only over time that it actually kind of crystallizes into something more powerful.

So if you set up your life looking for eureka moments and looking for epiphanies,

you actually won't succeed. What you want to do is cultivate these hints that are floating around.

That's what the truly transformative ideas are going to come find.

Stephen Johnson has written a dozen books about how we come up with ideas and how we make decisions.

His books are full of wonderful stories like how Darwin made the decision about whether or not to get married,

or how a defecating duck helped lead to the computer.

So when he visited our studio in Manhattan, I knew we were in for a fascinating conversation.

This is so great to be able to talk to you because we talk most of the time on this show about relating and communicating and relating to other people.

And I think your work, at least some of your work deals with relating to our own brains.

Right.

And that's fascinating to me because whatever the project is, whether it's making a big decision or trying to find the next big idea that we want to engage in,

we've got to get in touch with the back of our heads somehow where all the work is being done.

Yeah, that's right. Well, that's nice to say.

And it is a common theme throughout all my different projects is, you know, one major one is what you say about ideas.

When people have transformative ideas, literally where do they come from?

Like what is the kind of root of that?

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