I am an information addict. For all of my life, I’ve loved ideas: facts and theories, concepts and conjectures, knowledge and wisdom. In short, anything I can pack into my brain. Which makes the internet a dangerous place for me. I can – and often do – waste hour upon hour, exploring, reading, surfing from verbose site to equally verbose site.

This morning, for example, my carousing took me from fractal geometry to the biological evolution of morality, from the feng shui of desk layout to the history of electoral math. And, frankly, it didn’t take me there quickly. Were I simply to click my browser closed, I’d easily free up hours each day, cross far more of my lengthy to do list.

But I don’t. And, for that, I’ve always harbored more than a bit of guilt. Oh weak-willed self! Oh procrastinating spirit!

Today, though, in between surfing stretches, I set out to write the start of yet another chapter of Radical Entrepreneurship, the unorthodox business book I’ve been slowly and steadily piecing together over the past months. The chapter was on ideas, and, particularly, on how and where to find good ones. Though I’d outlined most of the other chapters to a disturbing degree, this one was – to put it mildly – still a bit vague. Where, exactly, do ideas come from? And what, if anything, can we do to make more good ones?

Pondering that question, I flashed back to a point made by David Gelernter, an eccentric Yale computer science professor who – among other things – revolutionized parallel computing, got Unabombed, and penned a book proclaiming the 1939 World’s Fair as the height of world civilization. Gelernter, I remember, once pointed out that great ideas rarely come from people deeply entrenched in a single field. Instead, paradigm shifts depend on ‘top view’ – the ability to look down across multiple disciplines, to connect together disparate ideas that neatly interlock in ways nobody previously considered.

Starting a company, it’s remarkably easy to get pulled deeper and deeper into the minutiae of operations, to look no further than the balance sheets and business plans piled up on desktop. Which, frankly, is a huge mistake. It’s exactly that laser focus, that lack of step back and think things through with the new perspective of new ideas, that gets businesses into trouble, cuts off innovation before it even begins to take root.

And, with that in mind, as I pulled up pages on bookbinding and calligraphy this afternoon, for the first time I didn’t scold myself for time wasted. I didn’t even press to find links between the new thoughts packing my mind and any of my more day-to-day pursuits. I simply let the information sink in, confident that, somewhere, somehow, I’d be able to put it to good use.

As Da Vinci once observed, “men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.” Despite the name of the site, I certainly won’t lay claim to lofty genius. But least work? That, I think, I’ve got down pat.