Skip to content

My Deeply Selfish, Idiosyncratic Relationship with Ideas

“Do I want to spend time with this idea or this person? 
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

It’s always hard to interrogate your own intellectual processes.  I don’t have a formal method. The criteria I always use is “Do I want to spend time with this idea or this person?  Is there more there?  Is it something that I don’t know much about?  Does it connect up with other things I know?”

All my investigative criteria are personal.  It’s just all about what I think would be fun to do. There is no kind of evaluation of the broader commercial potential for the idea. I don’t really care whether anyone else is interested in it.  The reason I went into this business is I didn’t want to have to be beholden to some outside judge or critic or market. So its a deeply selfish idiosyncratic process, I suppose. 

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
A bearded man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt speaks with a microphone clipped to his collar in front of a purple background with white dots.
The Well
How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
▸
13 min
—
with
Rainn Wilson
Up Next