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Why A Good Idea Takes 13 Years To Arrive
The amazing power of the “slow hunch”
Clive Thompson
9 min read·<br>Jun 30, 2022
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via PixabayIn his terrific book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson wrote about a fascinating aspect of big ideas:<br>They take a long time to bake.<br>We like to think that big ideas come from a sudden “aha” moment, but as Johnson argued, this most often isn’t true. He investigated a bunch of famously big ideas and found that their creators spent years, and even decades slowly building up towards their big epiphany.<br>They often had an inkling of the idea early on, as a sort of ill-formed hunch. Then they took a long, long time to refine it. Over the years, as they read and learned and wrote and experienced life, they’d keep on returning to their hunch, feeling it slowly take shape.<br>Then one day, years later — when the time was ripe — they turned that hunch into the finished idea.<br>That’s how Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, as Johnson notes: In decades of copious note-taking, he kept on gathering more and more data that suggested the contours of evolution, and he’d slowly poke at the concept. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web after decades of obsessing over a dream of the perfect info-organizing technology, and after years of actually coding different data-sorting apps. In…
Published in The Medium Handbook<br>48K followers<br>·Last published Jun 18, 2026
A hands-on handbook for writers and editors on Medium. Read practical, actionable advice to write and edit on Medium.
Written by Clive Thompson
35K followers<br>·739 following
Tech, science, culture -- and how they collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. Mastodon: @clive@saturation.social; clive@clivethompson.net
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