On a cold, foggy morning in the Amsterdam Forest, my Discover Weekly playlist was blasting on high volume while I was pushing hard through my running intervals.
All of a sudden, without me doing anything to trigger it, I entered the blissful state where ideas come rushing into the mind. They came at a much faster speed than my running pace. Warp speed, to be exact.
The ideas were for a book I was working on. I saw the cover clearly in my mind’s eye: orange canvas hardcover, topped with a transparent sleeve printed with a big white serif typeface set vertically, and a postcard of one of my photographs placed under the sleeve. Oh, and the book came with a magnifying bookmark so the photos could be examined in detail. Aha!
That was it. Transmission over. It came in one complete package, and I signed for its reception with an approving smile on my face.
I always smile after a eureka reception.
Sidenote: runner’s high paired with idea high is a strong sensation. 100/10 experience, highly recommended.
To make this experience even more bizarre, while I sat down to enjoy the sun emerging behind the morning fog — and appreciate the new ideas I’d received — a new song played on my Discover Weekly.
We could make it real
Anything you feel
So tell me all your big ideas
We could make it real
After hearing this and getting some goosebumps, I thought:
Are you f*cking kidding me?
This song, right after having a moment like that?
⚠️ Warning, things will get a bit spiritual here ⚠️
Even though I explained/minimised this as a coincidence, it felt strange. I felt directed (The Truman Show kind of directed). I was questioning a few things, my spirituality being one of them. Beyond the confusion caused by this, I felt highly motivated and energised. It was exactly what I needed to move past a dead end I was reaching with my book project.
Reflecting further on the song’s lyrics, I realised something. In the past, I took pride in thinking long and hard to come up with and shape ideas, but this moment made me look at things in a flipped way. I saw the idea as something coming from somewhere else, fully formed. The idea was not mine to shape. My job was simply to 1. listen ➜ 2. make it real. Much simpler.
Call it a eureka moment, but I call it a calling. Or perhaps a mission. Given to me. By whom, I don’t know. That’s exactly what this article is set to discover. Another mission of mine.
P.S. Since then, I’ve had a name for these transmissions: Big Ideas.
The case for the divine transmission of ideas
As another coincidence, around the same period, I listened to an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast with Elizabeth Gilbert. She spoke about how the universe left her without an idea of what to do during the COVID lockdowns. She was bored and kept asking the universe for an idea.
The answer she felt she received was:
“We don’t need you at the moment. We’ll reach out when we do.”
It’s a wonderfully absurd idea. And yet, I immediately understood what she meant.
Gilbert wrote extensively about this topic in her book Big Magic. Her concept is that ideas are not simply products of the human mind. Instead, they exist independently and are looking for human collaborators to pair with.
According to Gilbert, ideas first knock. You may feel a sudden spark of inspiration, an itch to pursue a project, or an unusual pull towards a particular direction. If you engage with the idea, it lingers. If you ignore it long enough, it leaves and goes looking for someone else.
And Gilbert is not the only one feeling like this:
Paul McCartney famously woke up with the melody of Yesterday in his head and initially assumed he’d unconsciously stolen it. He even said: “It was like finding it on the street”.
Nikola Tesla often described inventions appearing vividly and fully formed in his imagination as visions.
John Cage frequently spoke about removing the ego from creation and allowing things to emerge and becoming a vessel rather than an author.
William Blake frequently described receiving visions and seeing himself as a conduit rather than an inventor. In his words: “I write when commanded by the spirits.”
Plato believed that ideal forms exist independently of humans and that learning is closer to remembering than inventing.
Now… with all that being said… this is in no way scientific. This is something that Gilbert and the others felt, experienced, and put into words. Even though it’s not proven, I am not disregarding it. Whether that’s literally true isn’t really the point.
The point is that anyone who has experienced a powerful creative breakthrough knows exactly what they are talking about. Because some ideas don’t feel invented, they feel received. They arrive with a strange sense of completeness, as if they existed well before you became aware of them. That’s certainly how my Big Idea moments have felt.
If you need any more arguments supporting this position…
Why do we say that an idea came to us?
I’ve always found that curious.
On the other hand, there is another way to look at it.
The case for the internal generation of ideas
Putting the idea of us as receivers of the universe’s ideas aside, the alternative idea is that we are generators. Kind of like ChatGPT or other LLM’s are. I mean no offence when I say: you are a YouGPT. It’s less mystical, and it might sound crazy, but hear me out.
We are a sum of our experiences: everything we’ve read, heard, seen, felt. Everything our parents, friends, and other people in our lives said and did. All of this is our training set, stored somewhere in our system.
Take all of that and add: the right time, the right place, a specific frame of mind, and ideas will generate in varying shapes, sizes, and frequency. They might be similar to the ideas of others, but no idea will be identical.
I said that we are like LLM’s, but there is a crucial difference between us.
We generate our best ideas when non-prompted.
Our best ideas appear while walking. While showering. While doing the dishes. While running through a forest. The conscious mind steps aside and the subconscious gets to work. Perhaps a eureka moment is simply our internal model revealing its latest breakthrough. Eureka moments are subconscious connections of all of the dots mentioned above.
So with this theory, the idea is not downloaded from the universe but it presents itself from deep inside us, by us, for us. And those are the best kind of presents.
Many thought like this before:
Graham Wallas proposed a 4-stage model of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification; similar to the Double Diamond or the Natural Design Process (shameless plug).
Daniel Kahneman wrote a lot about subconscious processing and
decisions and insights occurring before conscious awareness in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that deep flow work feeds creative breakthroughs at a later point in Flow.
Steven Johnson wrote about how ideas and breakthroughs emerge from networks, collisions, and long incubation periods in Where Good Ideas Come From.
Dean Keith Simonton’s theory was that creativity emerges from variation, recombination, and selection of ideas in his Origin of Genius.
Another key piece of research, conducted over a period of 20 years, was the one done by John Kounios and Mark Beeman, documented in their The Eureka Factor book.
According to the research highlighted in the book and subsequent lectures, certain conditions significantly increase the likelihood of experiencing a sudden breakthrough:
Positive Mood: Joy and safety promote conceptual flexibility, whereas anxiety and tight deadlines focus the mind too narrowly on details.
Incubation Period: Stepping away from a problem to perform non-demanding, physical tasks (like taking a shower, walking (or running) in nature, or gardening) allows the background brain to work unconsciously.
The Default Mode Network: Rest and mind-wandering activate neural pathways that bridge distant, seemingly unrelated concepts.
Stage 2 Sleep: Studies show that achieving light, stage 2 sleep helps weaken unhelpful neural blockades and promotes sudden realisation upon waking.
That explains what I experienced quite well as well. 3/4 conditions were met.
It does not explain the song I heard and the feelings I had throughout my experience. It leaves me partly satisfied.
So who is right?
The spiritualists or the neuroscientists? The receiver theory or the generator theory?
I honestly don’t know.
Science has a compelling explanation. Psychologists describe insight as a process of preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. You work intensely on a problem, get stuck, walk away, and then the solution suddenly appears while your mind is focused elsewhere.
The mechanism makes sense. But the feeling remains mysterious. No scientific explanation I’ve encountered fully captures what it feels like when an idea arrives complete. When it arrives emotionally charged. When it feels less like a thought and more like an instruction.
Maybe Gilbert and others arguing on behalf of the universe are right. Maybe ideas are living things looking for collaborators. Or maybe every idea is the result of millions of forgotten experiences quietly shaping into something new beyond our awareness, nothing to do with the universe but only with us.
Does it matter where ideas come from?
No. Not really.
What matters is that we keep on listening when they come our way.
Because I suspect the real question isn’t where ideas come from. The more interesting question is why some ideas feel like responsibilities. Most ideas don’t become missions. My last set of Big Ideas did.
The more I paid attention, the more obvious it became. In the case of my book project: A love of photography. A love of design and typography. A love of cities and travel. A love of coffee table books. A meaningful creative challenge. Even an opportunity to create something that feels like an homage to my great-grandfather and uncle.
All of these threads seemed to converge on the same point. The idea kept returning. Fists of all whispering. Then nudging. Then insisting. Until eventually I stopped asking where it came from and started asking what I was going to do about it.
The best ideas I’ve ever had never arrived when I was trying to force them. They arrived while running through a forest, walking through a bookstore, listening to a song, or simply paying attention.
Maybe that’s the lesson. Not to obsess over the origin of ideas. But to both sharpen our receptors and improve our training set.
Maybe ideas are looking for people willing to bring them into the world. Or maybe every idea originates inside us and simply emerges when the conditions are right. Either way, the responsibility is the same.
When a Big Idea arrives, our job is simple:
Listen.
Then make it real.
I am still working on my book, but at least I made this article real.
Need to leave now, I am going for a run in the forest.
This article was originally published on Medium. You can find the original post here.