The Tao of Product Part 2: The Product Finds You (Or, Why You're Not as in Control as You Think)
Every great product starts the same way: as an idea, arriving uninvited, tapping insistently at the edges of your attention. It's never at a convenient time. You're in traffic. You're on a walk. You're just about to fall asleep. Suddenly, there it is—a fully-formed concept, a whisper of something inevitable, a sense that you've just glimpsed the shape of something that wants to exist.
This moment of inception mirrors what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as the emergence from incubation—that mysterious interval when connections form beneath conscious awareness. The Japanese concept of ma (間) offers similar wisdom: true creativity emerges not from perpetual activity but from the negative space between efforts, the sacred emptiness where unexpected patterns can reveal themselves.
The best ideas feel like this. Like they are choosing you. I'm with Liz Gilbert on this one—it's less about summoning an idea and more about becoming the kind of person who can recognize one when it arrives. The worst thing you can do in this moment? Assume that it's yours to control. David Lynch compares it to catching a fish—you didn't create the fish, you just caught it.
This perspective stands in direct challenge to Silicon Valley's dominant creation myth—personified by Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" framework that suggests innovation is primarily an act of will, something you can force into existence through sheer determination. There's a seductive simplicity to this view: that with enough intelligence and force of personality, you can simply conjure revolutionary products from nothing.
But that's not how creativity actually works. Not the deep kind, anyway.
Religious people thank their creator for the talent to be a vessel for these ideas. Rick Rubin notes that creativity means living a life full of attention and noticing, then allowing your unique viewpoint to become the sieve through which all your collected observations flow into your chosen medium. I've heard folks say that creativity isn't something you have, but rather an entity you're in a relationship with.
This relational view of creativity appears across traditions. The ancient Greeks spoke of the daemon—not as devil but as guiding spirit that accompanies each soul. Vedic tradition recognizes darshan—the art of seeing and being seen by the divine within creative work. Indigenous wisdom traditions worldwide acknowledge creation as conversation with forces larger than the individual self.
The truth lies somewhere in this middle ground—between complete passivity and total control. Yes, discipline matters enormously. Yes, you must show up consistently and do the work. But the initial spark, the core intuition that guides true innovation? That comes from a deeper place than conscious planning. It emerges from somewhere mysterious, whether you call it the unconscious, the collective imagination, or divine inspiration.
This is why I'm wary of founders who approach product creation as a purely analytical exercise—those who identify market opportunities through research and then reverse-engineer solutions without any authentic connection to the problem. The business insight driving a product should be rooted in genuine understanding, preferably hard-won through personal experience. When you've lived with a problem—when you've felt its friction in your daily life—you bring an intuitive wisdom to its solution that no market research can replicate.
No matter your spiritual framework, an idea isn't yours to dominate and control. It's a gift to nurture and shepherd into the world. You hear this core insight across disciplines and traditions: to be creative is to notice, synthesize, listen, attune, and be a vessel for something greater to come through you.
