John Carmack’s Five-Part Idea Generation System
Coming up with creative ideas is already hard enough, but coming up with good ideas is even more difficult. Everyone has their own little system for doing this, and in a blog post, Amjad Masad shares what he learned from programmer John Carmack, best known for his work on games like Quake and Doom.
Masad paraphrases Carmack’s internal Facebook talk last year, which described Carmack’s “antifragile system” for generating ideas. Basically, it’s a five-part system that helps you distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas during failure. Here’s a rephrasing of Masada:
- You work on a problem, and you have an idea, and with it the original idea.
- You should immediately try to refute your idea – think of all the times it fails, test it, stress it.
- If the idea stands up to rigorous testing, it has a basis for further research or implementation.
- If the idea is implemented and works – great
- If an idea doesn’t pass rigorous validation or implementation, you can quickly move on to the next idea without feeling degraded because you didn’t dwell on it and talk about it. this is not your favorite idea.
It’s not really something we haven’t seen before, and it mostly boils down to “learning from failure,” but it’s good to have a systematic approach. Visit Masada’s website to learn about Carmack’s presentation.
John Carmack on Idea Generation | Amjad Masad