People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.

This is a concept that I’ve heard mentioned by smart people that I admire - David Senra & David Perell.

The concept is that ideas will get out into the world one way or another. There is a time and place in history where the collective consciousness is brewing an idea that rises to the surface and eventually breaks through. We assign the discovery of the idea to the person who put it into words or delivered it first. But the idea was going to happen with or without them.

History is told by the winners so we only hear the story of one person’s pursuit of an idea. In reality, there are often multiple people working on a similar idea simultaneously in different places. 

This concept is called simultaneous invention and there are famous examples of it in recent history - the telephone, the steam engine, the light bulb and evolutionary theory were all being developed independently by different people at the same time. This has been the case throughout human history.

Ideas have people. 

I like this concept because it illustrates the fact that new ideas are less about miraculous breakthroughs and more about persistent curiosity in the ideas that already surround us.

This leads me to believe that curiosity is more important than intelligence. If ideas have people then it will be the curious people who put themselves in the right place to be discovered by an idea.

So how do we become the type of people who are discovered by new ideas?

Be curious - Follow your curiosity into wide-ranging areas and learn from experts in those subjects. A broad knowledge of many topics will increase your exposure to ideas.

Be a collector - Create a database, swipe file or notebook of all of the great ideas you come across. Collecting these into one place allows you to recall them in the future and creates the opportunity for ideas to collide together.

New ideas come about from old ideas colliding with each other. It’s just a matter of putting ourselves amid those collisions so that we can be discovered by a new idea looking to take shape.

P.s. I recommend Tiago Forte’s book Building A Second Brain on structuring your collection of ideas.