One of my goals for this year is to read the works of David Hume. Perhaps not all of them (all 6 volumes of ‘The History of England’ aren’t exactly beating a path to my door at this stage). But enough to really start to get my head around some of the key concepts that this giant of Western Philosophy who lived just up the road in the same city as me – albeit some 200-odd years ago – became world-renowned for.
I guess that probably means reading the entirety of at least one of my two copies of ‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding‘…
But while I’m in what I like to think of as the preparatory stage (readily identified as being that stage between hearing repeatedly about the book and actually sitting down and working your way through it, when instead the guilt is building that I’ve gone through life without yet reading a book that seems to have shaped innumerable conversations around the globe for a very long time), my mind is tuned to every mention that I come across of his name.
All of which meandering instruction goes some way to explain why I found an article (‘How to generate ideas: Be more Hume, and stop doing what you’re f****ng told‘ by Clare Barry ) particularly interesting today.
I plan to revisit this post once I do – finally – get round to actually doing the reading. But in the meantime, here’s a couple of my takeaways.
Hume talks about the difference between impressions (the things we hear, see, feel, love, hate, desire or wish) and ideas (the entirely subjective responses we have to those impressions). So “ideas aren’t some divine intervention or a spasm of genius – they are entirely dependent on what you’ve experienced”.
Her conclusions are:
– Stop doing what you’re told: to come up with ideas, you have to reject the ‘usual’ way of doing things.
– Ideas are created by unique collisions of our experiences – so experience as much as you can whilst seeking new ideas. And specifically, don’t consume the same content everyone else looking to be creative is consuming.
– Never dilute a decent idea. Continue in the face of criticism, no half-measures. The path to mediocrity is littered with the accepted suggestions of others.
A few things to think about there. But there are obvious examples of where each of these approaches can be shown to have worked in the past.