Do you want to know where breakthrough ideas really come from? I’ll give you a clue: they don’t come from some lightning bolt in the sky.

Breakthrough ideas, almost invariably, are found at the intersection of two or more seemingly unconnected things. What do these intersections look like?

• They look like Johannes Gutenberg connecting a wine processor and movable type and creating the printing press.
• They look like Steve Jobs connecting computers and a college calligraphy class and creating Apple.
• They look like a blind boy connecting the feel of a pine cone with reading and creating Braille.

So how do you come up with these connections? How do you join the ranks of geniuses like Johannes Gutenberg, Steve Jobs, and Louis Braille?

One way is by asking what I call Connecting Questions.

A Connecting Question is one that forces your brain to search for those unseen connections. For example, if you see two seemingly unrelated things and then ask, “How is this like that?”—well, you’ve just asked a Connecting Question! And that puts you in a creative space that most people never visit. That’s because most people see two seemingly unrelated things—and just move on.

There were probably, for instance, other students who were interested in computers and who took that exact same calligraphy class. But they never asked the Connecting Question. They never looked for the intersection. It’s like a Venn diagram:

Circle A is computers. Circle B is calligraphy. That’s all most people see. But Steve Jobs saw the intersection, the connection—and that’s where the trillion-dollar breakthrough lived (Apple was the world’s first trillion-dollar company).

Your breakthrough ideas will live at the intersection of two or more seemingly unconnected things. But in order to find them, you need to ask questions like:

• What’s the connection?
• Where do these two (or more) things intersect?
• How is this like that?

In other words, you need to ask a Connecting Question.