I like to imagine that my brain runs on mentons.

Mentons are tiny particles of mental energy that move through the brain producing thoughts, intuitions, and insights. The more mentons you have, the more ideas you are able to produce and the better the quality of those ideas. When you run low on mentons you feel listless, dull, and tired, and you can no longer think straight.

Picturing mentons helps me to think about how I think and I can think better. If you’re in the idea business, as I am, you care a lot about getting and using mentons.

So how do you get more mentons? How do you use them to produce great ideas?

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The brain runs on fuel. I discover this every evening when the night looms black through the windows and the pillow beckons. After a long day of thinking and typing and talking and listening and programming and parenting and the rest, I start to run out of steam.

And yet I’m convinced that steam is not the fuel my brain runs on.

I have several evidences for this belief. First, my head is not (usually) hot enough to suggest that steam churns within it during my most productive hours. Second, my experiences with bringing steam into contact with flesh suggest that the combination is not a happy one, and since my brain is flesh, I don’t imagine it would feel as comfortable as it usually does with steam running through it. Finally, if my brain ran on steam, presumably it would have to vent at times due to pressure build-up or whatnot. Since steam never actually comes out of my ears (despite what my kids say), I don’t see evidence of its venting, and thus no evidence of steam.

For these three reasons, I don’t believe the brain runs on steam.

But it must run on something, because it can clearly run out of whatever it runs on, and does so virtually every night.

In fact, sometimes my brain runs out of whatever it is long before night comes. Sometimes after a particularly grueling day, my brain is so low on fuel by dinnertime that I can barely navigate the drive home. On particularly bad days—and these seem to happen especially after a really terrific Tex-Mex lunch—I’m ready to fall asleep by 2PM and can hardly rub two thoughts together (speaking metaphorically, of course).

So what is it that fuels the brain—that enables it to work? What substance or particle is it that my brain uses to generate ideas and intuitions, visions and creations? What causes this fuel to run out, and how do I get more of it?

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In the last couple of posts I’ve talked about a programmer’s greatest enemy: getting stuck. I talked about the various levels of how stuck you can get, from getting stuck while trudging through documentation to getting stuck because you don’t have the resources—passwords, files—that you need to perform a task.

This leads me to my ultimate advice for how to avoid getting stuck and how to get unstuck.

The secret to getting and staying unstuck is to keeping taking steps forward. Simple as that sounds, it is more difficult than it seems, and many programmers never master it.

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A programmer’s worst enemy is getting stuck. Getting stuck on a problem hurts your productivity. Worse than that, it hurts your joy, your confidence, and your soul. Therefore learning how to avoid getting stuck, how to recognize when you’re stuck, and how to get unstuck is a key skill in the quest of becoming a great programmer.

One of the things that helps me both to avoid getting stuck and to get out of being stuck is understanding the different kinds of stuck.

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