I suppose there are other ways to strategize but in my experience, it’s not so much about empirical evidence to support your strategic hypothesis as it is about the ability to demonstrate the joining of the dots.

To finetune this skill, it is perhaps important to stay in touch with many things, and indepth associations with a few subjects but the purpose of that information is not so much for the details as it is for the correct contextual flavour.

The third step often *does* come, for me, while lying in a bathtub or going for a walk with the dog, but it’s a direct result of what you do, which is through interacting with a wide variety of people. For me, there’s some data collecting that happens through discussion, but a lot of creative synthesis happens “in the background,” and it takes a quiet moment for those things to bubble up to the surface.

On the project I’m currently working on, for instance, there are two “big ideas” at work – one occurred to me in the shower, one while I was walking the dog – both triggered by subtle interactions in a very quiet, solitary environment. In one case, I was twisting the hot water knob with my foot, in the other, Mobius kept walking around me the wrong way, wrapping my feet up in the leash.

Neither actual example is relevant to the thought directly, but it triggered something that set of what *felt* like a cascade of ideas that resulted in the core concepts for how this game is different than any other game.

Sorry – digression – but the point is that Duggan may say this is a solitary process because a lot of people have that critical moment in solitary environments, but I’d venture to say that it’s because they’ve collected a lot of information that they can mentally process in the background via interaction with others. So you’re both “right.”

But this all gets to a different point, and one I’ve been thinking about for a while without coming to any sort of reasonable conclusion:

How will Google change the way we *think*?

That is, for many, many years, information retention was a metric of intelligence. If you could remember a bit of trivia, and recite it on demand, you could get a good score on any test in high school, and most tests in college. This was *how* you “became smart.” You built up your “shelf of historical examples” so that you could potentially synthesize them later.

But Google takes that shelf and makes it bigger than anyone could possibly retain, though it does so by pulling it *out* of your brain, where it’s immediately accessible, and making it one step removed.

So, what’s smart, then? Or rather, what’s smart *going to be* in the future? Because whether you pull a fact out of your ass and I respond to it immediately, or I respond to it a moment later after consulting my iPhone’s Google Search, as long as I have the *right* fact, does it matter whether I knew it or not?

But the other side is that you need to be able to know where to get information, how valid that information is, the reliability of the source, blah blah blah – and that comes from having a certain amount of that experience stored in your head where it can immediately be synthesized.

So, right now, we have a lot of people who retain a “complete set” of information – “expertise” as they call it, so that they can rapidly synthesize new data in their specific field. Or, as a generalist, you might store a smaller set of information in any field, but be able to synthesize those pointers to larger banks of info into something that points at something new.

But is there, potentially, a subset of information that you need to store internally to give you access to *all* that information *as though it was stored in your own mind*?

Maybe it’s a different interface into search. Maybe it’s some visual categorization of that information that mimics your own synapses that you can navigate without even thinking about it. Maybe you can literally plug the internet into your brain, filter it for signal/noise, and suddenly have access to many orders of magnitude more information than you could ever have stored in your head, but in a way that you can immediately and intuitively synthesize?

I dunno – like I said, this line of thinking has never led anywhere, but it keeps popping up again and again.

(Or if it’s only 8,000 hours, you’re only 2k hours away from world-class expertise…)