[0898]

Smart people have always stolen ideas from completely unrelated industries.

I mean, Gutenberg invented the printing press after seeing a wine press crush grapes. Velcro was invented when some guy found burrs stuck to his trousers.

Genius isn’t conceiving some magic new technology. It's taking a mature technology and transplanting it elsewhere.

For Christmas, I bought myself a pass to Masterclass.com. They have classes by people like Malcolm Gladwell, Helen Mirren and Martin Scorsese.

I found that watching them sparks all kinds of unexpected epiphanies that you can apply to your life or your work.

For example, Deadmau5 has a folder of unfinished loops and melodies. He calls it his "Mr Potatohead" bin. He spends his time building little components – and then once in a while experiments with different ways of putting them together to make a track.

That's actually very similar to how I write.

Observing other professions is a great way to get your brain purring.

[oftenwrong]

>For example, Deadmau5 has a folder of unfinished loops and melodies. He calls it his "Mr Potatohead" bin. He spends his time building little components – and then once in a while experiments with different ways of putting them together to make a track.

KRS-One reportedly did something similar:

> ‘Go to the car, and get me the black, blue, and green bags. And bring those here.’ They bring them in. ‘Great.’ He unzips these duffle bags full of stacks and stacks of rhyme notebooks. Rhymes he wrote in the ‘70s and ‘80s. He’ll go, ‘Umm, let’s see here, and that, and here, give me that yellow one, okay, and give me that brown one. Okay, let’s go lay the song.’ And he uses like three different rhymes, but they all sound relevant. And they sound like something he just wrote. He just skims through it, and murmurs then goes, ‘Okay, I got it.’ These are rhymes he been had, and they sound like today. That’s amazing.

from https://www.complex.com/music/2011/02/dj-premier-tells-all-s...

I'm pretty sure he was referencing this practice in 1, 2 Pass it:

>I'm the difference between indo and oregano. Imagine how fresh I am now; I made these lyrics up a year ago.

[kevin_b_er]

Until the modern era. Now those ideas are copyrighted and patented. The Wine Press Industry would've sued gutenberg and the entire book making industry for making "a device that can press plant material" if this were the modern era of Intellectual Property.

[nicbou]

That's what Toyota did for a while. They recycled existing technology to make their little engines better and faster, instead of developing new engines at a much higher cost.