Leonardo Da Vinci, the famous polymath from the 15th century, transcends the boundaries of any modern-day discipline. Not only was he an accomplished painter with masterpieces like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but also a great scientist and inventor. He is known to be behind the first usable version of scissors, portable bridges, triple barrel canon, and even the design of a helicopter. It is as if his mind was a fountain of ideas, fresh and infinite.

But there’s a chicken or egg situation here. Vinci always carried a journal. In this journal, he jotted random musings, sketched birds in flight, and fleshed out ideas. Overall, it served as his brain dump. And frequently, he revisited these pages and brought some of the ideas to reality. It is hard to tell whether it was because of his mind that his journal was valuable, or the journaling habit polished his mind. We guess it’s both ways, like a feedback loop.

Centuries later, idea journaling continues to be valuable. For example, Sara Blakley, founder of Spanx, tells how her idea journal acted as her bridge from being a fax salesperson to the founder of a multi-billion-dollar business. But why does it work so well? And how can we benefit from this?

The Inception of an Idea

As a child, we often hear life lessons from our elders or read ideas in books, but they don’t mean much initially. It is only years later when we are in a random situation and suddenly the mind connects these dormant ideas from childhood to the context of the current scenario. Everything falls in place and starts making sense.

And it is not just an individual experience, but something humanity experiences collectively as well. Centuries later, The Art of War, Sun Tzu’s book on warfare strategy from the 5th century BC, continues to guide us in daily aspects of modern life. How can a book about war benefit someone sitting in the boardroom of a multinational company?

With this basis, look at your mind as a forest, and each idea as a seed sown deep under the ground. These seeds need different conditions to grow to their full extent. Many of these seeds lie dormant for years, but when the time comes and the conditions are right, the growth begins. The more you shine the light of your attention on each tree, the higher it grows. Eventually, some trees end up standing taller than others, while many others stay seeds forever.

All you can do is be open to life. Expose yourself to as many different experiences as possible, so there may be a hope that some of the ideas may find their optimal environment to grow and bring their fruits to this world. Go on to read the classics, explore new places, absorb different cultures, and talk to new people. Do whatever it takes for you to become the fertile land for your ideas.

But while analogies like this may sound beautiful, reality does not care. Today, many people argue, “all good ideas are already taken and there is nothing new to be done.”

What is your view about this?

The Nature of New

It is estimated that around 108 billion humans have lived on Earth before the current 7.7 billion. With a proportion of 14 to 1, the dead far outweigh the living. And with this, it is clear that most of the ideas would have already been worked on. In a way, getting new ideas is way more difficult today, than it would have been 1000 years ago.

But we ask you this: Do you even need new ideas?

Before the 1500s, the rate of dissemination of information was limited. Printing was labor-intensive and slow. But it all changed with the invention of the printing press when Johannes Gutenberg created a cocktail of ideas – screw press + movable type + paper + ink. Eureka!

It might seem simple in retrospect, as all the individual components had been around for ages, but no one could solve the printing problem. The screw press had long been used to make wine, while the movable type was a painfully slow printing method requiring rearrangement of character blocks for each page. But Gutenberg’s invention, thanks to his fresh perspective, accelerated printing multifold and eventually brought the literacy wave.

You see, most of the time it is not new that we need but looking at the old with a new perspective. We need to connect ideas from seemingly disparate disciplines: an interdisciplinary perspective.

For example, a cell phone uses plastic, glass, alloys, transistors, batteries, and so on. The raw ingredients are available to everyone. The quality of the idea/solution depends on the quality of the connections we create.

This is the nature of new. The more disparate the fields we connect, the more novel the idea.

The Need to Synthesize

To solve a problem, i.e., to come up with an idea, people take forever reading books and discussing with others. And yes, you do need some basic knowledge, but “basic” is the keyword here. It is easy to assume that the gap between your current state and your desired future state is your lack of knowledge. This is why people buy countless courses, keep switching diet plans, and fall for gurus. They think some new knowledge will miraculously solve their problem.

The truth is that we are drowning in information, most of it being noise. And often we don’t need more information to solve our problems. Rather, we need a system to filter the signal from our existing knowledge. A system that can lead us to the fundamental insights from which we can then synthesize an idea to solve our problem. A first-principles approach is what we need.

The desire to synthesize has been with humanity for ages. The best examples are the old religious texts, from Bible to Torah, and Bhagavad Gita to Quran, whose real value lies in the fact that they took all the prevailing important information and synthesized it in a digestible format. They put chaos into order by solving the problem, “How to live well?”

We need a method to analyze interdisciplinary information and synthesize solutions out of it.

Mapping the Meaning

Remember, our brain is an interconnecting machine. Synthesis is its default mode of working. Just see children figuring things out on their own to see this in action. Since their minds are not aware of the definitions of things, kids are silo-free thinkers. Their wild imagination turns a hose into a snake, a stick into a sword, and an elder into a horse. It might sound silly, but this is their mind being resourceful, finding utility in the available means.

Even though this might sound simple, our biases limit us from crossing the boundaries of different disciplines. We struggle to connect the fundamentals of physics with philosophy, economics with biology, and so on. And there is only one way to break this acquired pattern: mental exercise.

Engage as many senses as possible to help the brain think beyond the boundaries of each discipline. Bring interdisciplinary thinking to reality. Use mind maps.

Mind maps are a relatively new concept but surprisingly intuitive. And their effectiveness? Well, mind maps are one of the go-to tools for consulting firms like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), not to mention other everyday users outside these firms.

A mind map is a visual representation of information showing hierarchy and relationships among pieces of the whole. It is created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images and words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas. Additionally, you can cross-link ideas and tweak the color and width of branches to convey relationships.

The biggest advantage of mind maps is that, unlike lists and sentences, they work similarly to our brain: radial, not linear. Each word and visual stimulates the brain and triggers memory associations, thus conveying more meaning in less space. This makes them a great tool for taking notes, brainstorming ideas, and synthesizing concepts.

With ideas placed next to each other on a sheet of paper, the interconnections between ideas come out more intuitively than they would have in a paragraph or list, while visual hooks aid memory recall. A mind map breaks the boundaries of siloed thinking induced by years of paragraphs and lists and connects us back to the natural mode of thinking.

In a way, mind maps are based on the idea, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and what a better way to understand a mind map than looking at one. Here’s one on lawn tennis for reference.