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“If I don’t do it, Prince will.”
That was Michael Jackson’s response when Quincy Jones asked why he was in such a rush to record Thriller in the middle of the night after an eight-hour studio marathon, Quincy Jones wanted to go out and blast.
It was urgency. MJ understood something most creatives forget: great ideas don’t belong to you. They whisper to many but stay with the one who moves first. Brilliant insights have their own expiration dates, and if you’re not ready when they arrive, they’ll find someone who is.
Great ideas visit the minds of many, but stay with the one who acts first. Almost like there’s a frequency available every day that the universe gives you access to—one that’s not within your control.
We are not the sole owners of our best ideas. They exist in the ether before we grab them, and they’ll exist after we’re gone. Joe Rogan thinks ideas are a life form and I don’t think he knows Plato kinda said the same thing too with his theory of forms ages ago. That in itself is a same frequency they tapped into.
Every decision you’ve ever made, every brilliant insight you’ve ever had, every moment of perfect clarity—it might have originated in your experience, but the raw material was already there, waiting for the right circumstances to crystallize it into something actionable.
Consider how Darwin and Wallace simultaneously developed the theory of evolution, or how Leibniz and Newton both invented calculus within years of each other, completely independently. The same signal was broadcasting to multiple receivers. Tesla claimed his inventions came to him fully formed in dreams, describing himself as merely the conduit for ideas that seemed to exist outside his own mind. These weren’t coincidences—they were people tuned to a certain frequency at the same moment in history.
This is why certain solutions seem obvious in retrospect, why revolutionary ideas emerge simultaneously in different places in the world, why you can walk into a room and immediately sense what’s happening. It’s not magic—it’s pattern recognition operating on a level we’re barely conscious of. The information was always there; you just developed the right framework to process it.
We’ve built our entire understanding of success around the mythology of individual genius and rational choice, but the night MJ made Thriller suggests something different.
I also think we call “sleeping on it” is really just giving your subconscious time to process information your conscious mind couldn’t organize. Your daytime thinking operates in straight lines—logical but limited. Your subconscious state thinks in networks, making connections across seemingly unrelated experiences. It’s like slapping the metaphorical radio when it starts to make that crrzzgsjszhhsshsshh sound so you can get some signal. This is why solutions appear overnight, why problems that seemed impossible suddenly resolve themselves, why the most important decisions rarely feel like decisions at all. They feel like recognitions.
Every choice you make operates on this spectrum between overthinking and intuition. The people who seem to consistently make good decisions aren’t necessarily smarter—they’ve just learned to trust the process that exhausted musicians and sleep-deprived scientists understand instinctively.
The real insight isn’t mystical at all. It’s brutally practical: great ideas are time-sensitive, and hesitation kills more opportunities than bad judgment ever will. The question isn’t whether you’re connected to some universal consciousness. The question is whether you’re paying attention to what’s happening right in front of you, and whether you’re prepared to act when the moment arrives—even when you can’t fully explain why it feels right.