How to Have a Million-Dollar Idea?

Are you so fast that you cannot see that I must have solitude? When I am in the darkness, why do you intrude? - Bob Dylan

So many good ideas strike when you least expect them .. in the shower or while walking down the street. The eureka moment so often comes not in a conference-room brainstorming session but during this “unstructured” time, when your mind wanders mysteriously, your neurons networking and integrating, making new connections, without deliberate intent.

The quintessential example of the eureka moment is the atomic scientist Leon Szilard in 1933 waiting for a traffic light to change before stepping off the curb and comprehending in one instant the inevitability of the mushroom cloud. In the space of taking one step, he realized the right chain reaction would produce a nuclear bomb, a prospect so horrifying he would eventually write a letter that Einstein would sign and deliver to Roosevelt as a warning.

How can you make those rare moments of insight less rare? The simple act of taking walks is particularly well-suited to contemplation and deepening your thoughts. Like Szilard, on a walk you are out and about, considering a topic, and moving, taking in the world around you. Occasionally, asking another person to join a walk to consider a question or topic will also help. The walk can join two solitudes in a socially non-awkward way. On a hike or a walk with another person, you never feel the need to fill every moment with chatter. You can be alone together. Occasionally, a new solution will fall out of such a walk and neither person can take credit it for it; only the walk can.

It was on just such a walk with my sister Catherine in 2016 when I decided to build the livestreaming business, that would eventually lead to the agreement to sell the company for $500 million. At that time, the company was an ad-driven free dating business with no video capabilities, and although I had been aware of the success of livestreaming in China based on my travels there, I didn’t understand it. It seemed like a Chinese phenomenon with little to nothing to do with dating.

Strolling along the canal path in New Hope, Pennsylvania, I saw it for what it was: an answer to loneliness, Netflix meets Tinder, the modern version of the coffeehouse, a product that perfectly complemented our existing business. That insight led us to begin executing against a strategy 3–4 years before any Western dating brand took livestreaming seriously.

Another way to improve your imaginative output is to impose structure on your unstructured time. Block out your calendar an hour or two every morning before the day devolves into fighting fires, conference calls, and daily crisis. During this time, do whatever brings calm: workout, meditate, read, write, but do it alone and without spending much time on a screen, or if you do use a screen, turn off your wi-fi. Give space to your inwardness and let your independence develop, without constant modification by the thoughts and opinions of the people around you.

I often find that during a run, workout, or commute, I’ll suddenly have an idea related to something I’m generally looking for, whether it is a new product, a new partnership, or a solution to an existing problem. I always keep the Notes app on the first screen of my phone so that I am ready to jot down whatever idea comes into my head, so that I can examine in more intentioned moments if it has any merit. If I fail to write it down, the divinity that bestows ideas will not only give it to someone else, she’ll also make sure I forget it.

A daily or at least frequent writing practice can also help. The 13th-century poet Rumi said:

“Do you think I know what I’m doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as the pen knows what it’s writing.” — Rumi

So long as you are living the questions, the pen can often find answers that you cannot. The act of writing is a conversation between the pen, mind, and paper that leads to structured thoughts in the form of sentences and paragraphs and that constraint, which by its nature is integrative, the sentences and paragraphs naturally wanting to fit together, can yield ideas you never would have had without first giving yourself the space to have them. When everything is right, you are the vessel filled by another’s words, needing only to pour them onto the page and then read them, to see if they contain the answers you seek.

Solitude is the act of unplugging from the distractions that weigh on your insights. It can be achieved even in a crowd full of people in an airport customs line, where you will occasionally look up from your book and find them nearly incomprehensible with their grumbling small talk. The poet Rilke said what we need to achieve is:

“to be alone with yourself, to go into yourself and meet no one for hours … the way you were as a child, when the grownups walked around so busy and distracted by matters that seemed important because they were beyond your comprehension.” — Rilke

Solitude is the focus and purity of a small child, playing, unconcerned and undistracted, imagining a world into existence without concerning yourself, yet, with the people who will not understand it. There’ll be another time and place to concern yourself with the adult world.

Between these worlds, child and adult, you are the bridge and the person on it, inhabiting the child world of new ideas and imaginings, and then crossing with your sketches and intuitions to the adult world of execution and accountability, where mostly ideas come to die, but where every now and then, an idea shines with enough brightness to transform the adult world and allow its inhabitants a momentary glimpse back to that other world they once remembered.