On Ideas

Tivoli, NY by Jack Cohen

“A trend is—simply put—the spreading of an idea.”

My ears perked up.

I had dozed off a bit as the Amtrak train hummed along the tracks from New York towards Boston. Luckily, I hadn’t slumped left into my unassuming seatmate’s space. I was heading home.

Somewhere in Connecticut, before I closed my eyes, I had picked a podcast to listen to in Spotify—one that I had been hearing great reviews of for quite some time—Shane Parrish’s The Knowledge Project.

This particular episode (which I’ve linked below) was part one of an interview with Adam Robinson. Adam is many things, among them, he’s an educator, entrepreneur, investor, personality, and more. He even founded The Princeton Review back in the ‘80s and was so adept at SAT test prep that the organization that runs the test removed and rearranged certain sections in response to his work. But what I caught on to most with Adam was his fervor and curiosity around trends and their innate familial relationship to and origination from ideas.

He was paraphrasing one of his favorite books, Diffusion of Innovation by E.M. Rogers, when he shared that “a trend is—simply put—the spreading of an idea.”

It sounds simple. And it is. But it’s also deeply profound.

So much of our society is based on the straightforward success or failure of an idea’s ability to spread. Whether those ideas are spreading in the world of finance (i.e. market trends) or in the fashion industry (i.e. style trends) they each originate, not from a singular point, but rather from disparate and unique communities which coalesce around a particular viewpoint. It is one of the original chicken or the egg conundrums, is it not? Do ideas originate first within one mind and then find like minds of resonance? Or is there some environmental effect that is observed by many that then finds root in the minds of its audience?

The original question truly is: where do our ideas come from? But the “our” in that sentence is surprisingly dissimilar, I believe, to ideas of “his” “her” “your” or “my.”

I haven’t fully collected my thoughts enough on this topic to consider this my complete reflection on ideas. I just thought, as the week winds to a close, I’d proffer this up for, as Shane would say, “brain food.”

I’ll leave you with this final knowledge bomb from Adam:

“You can change the way people think in two ways: (1) by changing the questions they ask or (2) by providing more inspired answers.”

See you tomorrow.

**Winning at the Great Game (Part 1)***Author, educator, and hedge fund advisor, Adam Robinson shares powerful lessons on winning the game of life. He teaches…*open.spotify.com