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The Top Idea In Your Mind - Online Term Paper

The Top Idea In Your Mind

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it ...

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way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren't.

I'd hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I'd forgotten why I hated it so much. When we raised money for Y Combinator, I remembered. Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It's hard to get money. It's not the sort of thing that happens by default. It's not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you'll make little progress on anything else you'd rather be working on. [2]

(I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors. Professors nowadays seem ...

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The Top Idea In Your Mind. (2011, May 2). Retrieved January 22, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Top-Idea-In-Your-Mind/98738

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 5/2/2011 10:59:37 AM
Submitted By: seehuiseeuhui
Category: Personal Writing
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1074
Pages: 4

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