I woke up at 5:41am today calculating valuation caps. It was still dark out and I had only gone to sleep a few hours earlier, but I was immediately awake and aware of the fact that I had been weighing different strategies and paths for raising money as I dreamt. To quote Paul Graham's recent essay on the topic, raising money was officially "the top idea in my mind."

I was frustrated. Dave was supposed to be the one focusing his time on raising money so I could keep focusing on building HireHive. I wanted to be sleeping rather than tossing in bed making financial calculations.

Then something surprising happened. My frustration gave way as my mind shifted gears: my thoughts drifted towards figuring out how to control the top idea in my mind. I had, without intending to, changed the top idea in my mind.

That's when I realized that changing the top idea in your mind is like performing inception on yourself. You have to plant a seed idea in your subconscious and let it spread until it takes over.

I started thinking about why it was that my top idea had apparently shifted so quickly from one thing (raising investment for HireHive) to another (how to control the top idea in my mind).^[1] If changing my top idea is like performing inception on myself, could this help me more directly control my top idea?

I've thought about this some and have come up with a few hypotheses.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways I can imagine getting my top idea to change: Pushing another one on top of it, or popping the current one off. Pushing another idea on top means that another thought is strong and infectious enough to dominate my mind. Popping the current idea off means solving it, for some definition of "solving it."^[2]

When pushing a new idea on top, it's not enough to just have another idea that you "care more about." There are at least two other factors I can think of at play.

First, the reason I think it was easy for me to shift to another top idea so quickly was because the seeds of this other idea had already been planted in my mind. I had read Paul's essay last month. I had enjoyed it but finished it feeling a little let down; I wanted a more direct process for controlling the top idea in my mind.

I had seen Inception. I had enjoyed it as mind candy, at least as much as one can enjoy a film while being struck with intermittent pangs of guilt for taking an evening off work. 

I had gone to bed the night before wondering what to blog about. I had a couple ideas swirling around my head but I wasn't very excited about any of them. 

It was these different but ultimately related thoughts (my reflections on Paul's essay and Inception, as well as wanting to blog) that came together and coalesced into my new top idea.

The second factor that I think effects how likely an idea is to become your top idea is how concisely you can state it. The fewer words it takes to express an idea, the more likely it will be planted deep in your mind.^[3]

Like in the movie, performing inception requires that you start with the smallest possible kernel. The shorter and clearer your formulation of an idea, the purer the seed. The question that took dominance ("how can I control the top idea in my mind?") is nothing but short. 

If you want to change the top idea in your mind, make sure you can state the new one you want succinctly. Think about it deeply and then stop concentrating on it. Do the same for a couple other thoughts, possibly related and possibly not. Then either solve your current top idea or blog about it. I've found getting an idea to a "bloggable" state is a good way to pop it off the stack, leaving room for the next one to take root.

At least, that's what I'm hoping.

[1] For those who would claim the former hadn't actually been my top idea, I assure you it was: It's what my mind naturally drifted to when showering and it's what my dreaming self was focused on. Shower-thinking and dreams are the two strongest examples of ambient thought I know of.

For those who think the new idea didn't really take over, I can only say that it's what I dreamt about once I fell back asleep and what my mind explored further as I showered this morning.

[2]There's actually another option here: deciding you don't care about your current top idea. I don't think this is a common case for two reasons. First, since it's already the top idea in your mind, there's strong evidence that you do care about it a good deal. Second, trying to convince yourself that you don't really care about something and you shouldn't think about it is like the "don't think of an elephant" problem. It's unlikely to work because it's direct and it effectively wastes cycles. Why spend your time trying to not solve a problem?

[3] It's not exactly this, but the number of words it takes to state a thought is directly proportional to how clearly you understand it. The reason this isn't exact is because some ideas are more complex than others. It's possible that your thinking on idea A is clearer than idea B, even though you can express B in fewer words because it's a less complex idea. Regardless, I think "number of words needed to express" is a good heuristic.