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Sometimes a phrase or a metaphor sticks with me and it's usually not too hard to find it again. But because of the degraded quality of search engines in 2024, I had a bit of trouble digging this one out again. I just recently thought of that particular phrasing again, and tried my luck with Marginalia search, which I since some time now use as a default on my machine. More often than I'd like to after the first try I still need redirect the query with a !ddg or !g, but in this case my query found the article, which Google was not willing or able to unearth, on the third place.

It was from an essay on How to generate better ideas by Jakob Greenfeld.

Before you can hope to find any high-quality ideas, you have to come up with tons of crappy ones. You need to get them out of your system.

It's useful to visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.

There's no shortcut other than first emptying the wastewater.