John Carmack’s Deep Thoughts: Ideas, Work, and Emotion
KENT BECK·WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2015 John Carmack kicked off the internal Deep Thoughts Engineering Lecture Series yesterday with a talk about ideas. I’m reminded of the quote from Gandhi: The Movie--“You’re an ambitious man, Mr. Gandhi.” “I hope not.” John works on crazy visionary stuff, but he also has a history of shipping crazy visionary stuff so I can’t call him “ambitious”. His talk laid out how he thinks about how he does it. Ideas are cheap, execution dear. Protecting ideas is a losing proposition because the expected value of an idea is zero until proven otherwise. Ideas arise out of work, not contemplation. You can stare at the ceiling all you want and you won’t have ideas. If you get to work, the ideas will start to come. Enjoy the moment of enlightenment, but don’t hang onto it. It’s easy to hang onto the enjoyment of discovery too long, defer validation, and waste time. Enjoy invalidating your ideas cheaply. He likened this process to puzzle solving--what is the shortest path to demonstrating the idea won’t work? These last two points add up to a special kind of emotional intelligence, feeling satisfaction in the having of an idea and then quickly shifting to feeling satisfaction in invalidating the exact same idea. I experience this (sometimes in the breach) but I’ve never heard it explained before. Use cross-fertilization to spark ideas. He is intensely curious and unashamed about exploring divergent ideas. People around me reacted when he brought up ideas from rocketry, as if to say, “I could never think of such distant topics.” Yes, fellow geeks, yes you can. Even though I don’t come into the talk with the reverence for John that many of my fellow geeks have, by the end I was in awe of being in the presence of a brilliant mind working close to its full potential. I felt intimidated and at the same time welcomed and engaged and inspired. Wow.