In the ancient world, the word “genius” referred to communities, as often as it did to individual people. ​

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The musician-philosopher Brian Eno has a different name for the same idea: Scenius. It describes the intelligence and intuition of a cultural scene, as if genius is a communal pursuit as much as an individual one. In Eno’s words: “If genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, Scenius is the creative intelligence of a group.” ​

Scenius is The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, where C.S Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien frequented and birthed three of the five best-selling fantasy novels of all time: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings; it’s The Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of friends who met in England in the early 20th century such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes; it’s the Scottish Enlightenment which took place in late-18th century Edinburgh and inspired intellectuals like Adam Smith and David Hume; it’s early 20th century Vienna which birthed the artist Gustav Klimt, physicist Ernst Mach, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and economists Ludwig von Mises and Fredrich Hayek; and it’s the early days of YCombinator which created companies like Reddit, Dropbox, DoorDash, Airbnb, and Stripe. ​

As Stripe founder Patrick Collison said: "Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past...the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort.” ​

What did these groups have in common? ​

Often, leaps in progress are catalyzed by a step-change in how people think about the world. Leon Battista Alberti created the conditions for the Renaissance when he laid out the principles of linear perspective and elevated the cultural status of painters in a text called Della Pittura. Progress exploded when, between the years 1310 and 1510, artists learned how to paint with depth and perspective.

Raphael’s The School of Athens painting has a three-dimensional quality that artists couldn’t communicate 200 years before.

​ For the first time in human history, scenius is moving beyond physical geography. It’s happening on the Internet now. And it’s alive in obscure Discord forums, private group chats, and online schools.

Feedback is useful because we are blind to our own ideas. We struggle to separate good ones from bad ones or determine when they’re unclear. But when we ask friends for feedback, they’re not helpful. If they’re trying to be nice, they’ll shower you with compliments and superficial critiques which means your writing won’t improve. Sometimes, they’ll bash your writing which makes you feel worthless and dejected.

​ CRIBS turns anybody into an editor because it focuses on the emotions of your reader instead of the mechanics of writing. Together, the observations follow the MECE principle from consulting: mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Every emotion comes with an obvious next step, which I’ll explain below.

​ Confusing: Communication is the essence of writing. Effective writing happens when ideas are efficiently transferred from the writer’s brain to the reader’s. But confusing writing, which happens when the author tries to sound smart or doesn’t think clearly about what they’re trying to say, slows the transmission of knowledge.

​ Next step: If your writing is confusing because you’re trying to sound smart, replace your SAT words with ones that everybody understands. Alternatively, it may be proof that you haven’t thought enough about what you’re trying to write. If so, clarify your ideas by simplifying them.

​ Repeated: Good writing is concise. By definition, if you’re repeating yourself, your writing isn’t as concise as it could be. Repeating the same ideas is the writing equivalent of your mom telling you something you already know, over and over again. It’s a self-insult too because when you repeat yourself, you’re effectively saying: “I expressed myself so poorly the first time that I have to say the same thing again.”

​ Next step: Delete the repetitive parts.

​ Interesting: “Interesting” is the holy grail of online writing. It happens when insight meets entertainment, when you comfort the confused or confuse the comforted. By asking your editor to identify the most interesting sections, you’ll receive compliments that sustain your momentum and know where to double down.

​ Next step: Add prominence to your interesting ideas by writing more about them.

​ Boring: Readers have a zero-tolerance policy for boredom. They’ll click away once your writing becomes boring, but if you can keep them engaged, they’ll give you hours of their attention. Ask your editor to tell you which sections they wanted to skip or caused their mind to wander.

​ Next step: When something is boring, delete or rewrite it. The answer depends on if your writing is boring because of the ideas themselves or how you’re communicating them. If the idea is the problem, cut it. Or, if your delivery is the problem, rewrite the boring sections.

​ Surprising: Your job as a writer is to surprise your reader by telling them things they didn’t know and didn’t expect. Ideas that are new but not surprising are trivial. In contrast, surprising ideas break the reader’s mental model for how the world works, either by comforting the confused or confusing the comforted.

​ Next step: Delete everything that’s not surprising. Then pretend you’re a horror movie director by building suspense before every surprise.

​ CRIBS works as well with speaking as it does with writing because all the included emotions are easy to identify in people’s facial expressions: people raise their eyebrows when they’re confused, ask you to speed up when you repeat yourself, lean in when they’re interested, turn away when they’re bored, and gasp when they’re surprised. By paying attention to how people respond to your ideas in casual conversation, you can develop your ideas before you sit down to type them. ​

Creativity is serendipitous, but that doesn’t make it magic.

​ “Thinking harder” is not a recipe for creativity. More effort won’t necessarily lead to better ideas. Instead, creativity tends to arise in states of relaxation which are preceded by a long period of focused thinking. Although you can’t will yourself into creativity, you can create the conditions for it by following the Three B’s of Creativity: bed, bath, and bus.

​ Bed represents sleep. It’s a chance to put your subconscious mind in control of your thoughts. Closing your eyes is like restarting an overloaded computer. By the time you wake up, you’ve synthesized the ideas you’ve been thinking about and cleaned the windows of your mind. The artist Salvador Dali used to fall asleep after long spurts of work with a ball in his hand, hoping that it’d fall and wake him up just as he was entering a dream state. By falling asleep, his mind left the logical realm and entered an imaginative one.

​ Bath represents leisure. My roommate is a mathematician and whenever he’s stuck on a problem, he cracks open a beer and watches a TV show. The context switch calms his mind and within 30 minutes, he’s usually writing down solutions he wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Baths are one of the few places in the world where people aren’t absorbed by the drama of entertainment or the pings of technology, and only once those disappear can they hear themselves think.

​ Bus represents movement. It’s why Jack Kerouac spent so much time driving between American coasts that it looked like he was playing ping pong with his car. It’s why, when I was living in New York, I insisted on working from a new neighborhood every day. Bus is also why so many people write while they walk. As Morgan Housel said in my interview with him: “I walk a lot. Several times a day, just around my block. My neighbors probably think I’m crazy. But I think so much clearer when I’m walking. It’s where I ‘write’ most of my stuff.”

​ Together, the trinity of bed, bath, and bus reveals that creativity favors the unfocused and unconcentrated mind. When you follow them, creativity goes from being a mystical talent to a conscious way of being.

Writing can save you time. Publishing ideas on paper is how you create intellectual capital because writing is how you make your ideas permanent. Words on paper are the closest thing we have to time travel. Once you write something down, you can remix and reuse the ideas for the rest of your life.

​ Writing is research and development for your brain. The words you publish now are the seeds of your future projects. Every time you write down an idea, you add a Lego block to your intellectual arsenal. The more Legos you have, the more things you can build. Writing is the same. The more you write now, the more you can create in the future. As the number of artifacts you create increase linearly, the number of connections you make between them increase exponentially.

​ Starting a project when you’re a prolific writer is like running a marathon and starting at the 24-mile marker. You’ve already done most of the work. You don’t need to research, think of a new framework, or scavenge your memory for that great idea you once had but can’t remember anymore.

​ I’ve gotten to the point where I only say yes to projects I’m 80% done with. I only say yes to projects I can mostly tackle with Lego blocks I’ve already created. That intellectual capital took a long time to build, but since I can reuse the ideas forever, all those Lego blocks will save me thousands of hours over the course of my career.