Your ideas aren't slutty enough

Big ideas series #1: muller’s ratchet

One of my favorite intellectual hobbies is collecting big ideas.

Over the past few years, I’ve been hoarding them in a private Obsidian collection. 423 big ideas from established experts that cover various walks of life: personal development, philosophy, psychology, human nature, spirituality, work and wealth, and even thought experiments.

The key word in that sentence is private. Of those 423, I’ve published maybe a few dozen. The rest have never graced my public writing.

I used to think that was the safe way to do it. Let them sit. Refine them. Bring them out when they’re ready. Then a big idea from biology showed me that keeping them private was actually a stupid move. One that’s making my writing worse. And if you’ve got a notes app full of ideas you’ve never shared, it’s doing the same thing to yours.

I’ll get to that idea in a minute. First, some context...

This month, I’m running a tiny experiment. And it will be up to you if I keep doing it. I’m going to publish one shorter article per week that gives one big idea the spotlight it deserves. Partly for you. Partly because it’s me eating my own advice.

This week, we’re starting with Muller’s Ratchet. A big idea I heard from Leila Hormozi a couple of years ago that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It’s the one that showed me that being monogamous with my ideas was a mistake. And it’s such an important concept for all artists, creatives, and public intellectuals to understand, because it provides a useful lens for creating unique intellectual art that stands out in today’s sea of sameness.

Before we dive into it, let me quickly share the important difference between an idea and a big idea. I haven’t written about this in a while. And you’ll need to wrap your head around this to understand why you need more big ideas in your writing...

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What is a big idea?

“Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”
-David Ogilvy

I first heard about big ideas from Ogilvy. But he never defined one in such a way that I knew if I had one. I even asked a few of my bigger marketing and creator friends what a big idea was. None of them could give me a satisfying answer. Aside from: well... It’s big.

So here’s my best attempt at defining it:

Ideas are thoughts with the power to transform.
Big ideas are thoughts with the power to revolutionize.

Ideas are small recommended changes. Like we should change the look of cars to gain more speed. Big ideas are category defining changes. Like we should replace cars with hovercrafts. If an idea completely changes the way you look at a category, domain, or way of doing something, it is BIG.

In my speech at the Future Proof Creator Summit earlier this year, I put it another way that the audience seemed to like:

Ideas are thoughts.
Big ideas are thought generators.

Most ideas in writing are just ideas. They slightly change something about what you already think and do. You’re a fitness coach writing about the perfect running routine to lose weight. The reader is already running, you’re just teaching them how to do it more efficiently.

A big idea does so much more than that. It’s like telling the runner that running is a waste of time if you want to lose weight. You can just lift weights for 3 hours a week, eat clean, and suffer less. That’ a completely new paradigm. It radically changes the thoughts that your mind generates in the first place. Running isn’t even in the equation anymore.

I’m no fitness expert so let’s compare two similar big ideas about careers so you can see how drastically they affect your life:

Big idea 1: Go to college if you want to be successful

What thoughts does this big idea generate?

• Where should I go to school?

• What grades do I need?

• What jobs could I get?

• Where would I like to work?

• How much money could I earn per year?

Big idea 2: Become an entrepreneur if you want to be successful

Now look at how different the thoughts are that this big idea generates.

• What offers should I create?

• Where is the market demand?

• What skills do I have to learn?

• How do I learn these skills fast?

• How many customers do I need to make 6 figures a year? How will I get them?

Similar big ideas. Different thoughts. Vastly different lives.

I’m not claiming one is better than the other. I’m just illustrating that they’re both big ideas that when internalized can alter the course of your life.

Which is exactly why hoarding them was a mistake. A thought generator that only ever runs inside one head doesn’t just sit there waiting. It changes. And not in the direction you’d hope.

Now onto this week’s big idea: Muller’s Ratchet.

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What the fuck is Muller’s Ratchet? And why should I care?

Most of us treat our unpublished ideas like wine. Leave them in the dark long enough and they’ll be ready.

Biology says the opposite.

In 1964, a geneticist named Hermann Muller worked out what happens to organisms that reproduce by copying themselves, with no sex involved. Bacteria, mostly. Every child inherits every one of its parent’s mutations, the useful ones and the harmful ones. And there’s no mechanism for taking a harmful one back out. So the errors pile up, generation after generation, until the population can never get back to a cleaner version of itself. Think pure-bred dogs with knee problems, except worse, because at least the dogs had a mommy and a daddy.

He called it a ratchet, because a ratchet only turns one way. Righty tighty. No lefty loosey.

I call the result an inbred idea. One source, one mind, copied forward, errors and all.

I’ve made a career’s worth of them. When I first started questioning what I’d been raised with, I read 300 books in a few years and adopted many of Nietzsche’s conclusions without question. In his book Beyond Good and Evil, he framed a lack of recognition and isolation not as misfortune, but as the path to intellectual superiority. But maybe this is just an opinion colored by Nietzsche’s loneliness and lack of recognition for his ideas before his death. I never considered this potential error until I questioned it. Thankfully I did before it polluted my work.

Once you see the ratchet, you see it everywhere:

• Thinking: refine an idea in private long enough and its most obvious errors become invisible to you, because you’re the only one who’s ever looked at it.

• Business: small unaddressed failures compound into results no one can reverse.

• Writing: copying someone else’s article gets you their tics, and eventually gets you ignored (or cancelled). Steal like an artist instead: many sources, crossed.

• AI: models trained on the output of other models degrade with every generation. Researchers call it model collapse. It’s Muller’s Ratchet in code.

• Culture: a culture that stops letting outside ideas in stagnates first, then collapses.

So how do you turn the ratchet backwards?

You have more sex.

That’s not only a joke. There’s a leading theory that this is why sex exists at all. Sex is expensive. You pass on only half your genes and you have to actually find someone who’s down to fuck you. Nature pays that price for a reason: when two genomes mix, the mutations get shuffled into new combinations, so the bad ones are likely to be separated from the good ones and thrown out. Recombination is the only known thing that turns the ratchet to the left.

Creativity is the same thing. Cross an idea with a source that doesn’t already resemble it. Put it in front of a mind that disagrees with you. For the first time, the errors can be seen separately from the parts worth keeping. It’s taste (what you like) crossed with what works, with the catastrophic mistakes bred out. That’s what feedback actually is. Recombination for ideas.

Call that a crossbred idea. Two or more parents, not you alone.

The payoff isn’t only that you stand out, though you will, because a crossbred idea looks like nothing in either parent’s lineage. It’s that the errors you can’t see from inside your own head get bred out before they cost you years.

An inbred idea is a carbon copy on the fast track to death. A crossbred idea is the only kind that gets better with time.

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So take the idea you’ve been sitting on longest. Put it in front of one person you’re fairly sure will push back. Not to be validated. To find out which part is the error, because from inside your own head, you can’t.

Your ideas don’t need more time in the dark. They need intellectual sex partners.

-Taylin & Dale

PS. This big idea series lives or dies on whether you want it. If you’d like more of the 400+ to see daylight, reply to this email or let me know in the comments.

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PPS. At the end of October I’ll be launching The Multifaceted Writer Cohort. 6 weeks of live, group classes to turn your scattered interests and niche obsessions into articles that leave readers hooked instead of confused. Click below to join the waitlist if you don’t want to miss the details & launch window:

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