The current western culture puts a lot of value in ideas. The famous inventors are viewed as heroes that saved the mankind. The institution of a patent office and other "intellectual property laws" are designed to guarantee that whoever comes with a certain idea first, will profit from merely recording and sharing it to the end of their lives, and even decades after death. At the same time, the process of inventing something is portrayed as a single moment of insight, after which you can just relax and live happy forever after. It's like winning on a lottery -- as long as you don't lose your lottery ticket, or give it away, you are set.
I think this is all a fairy tale at best. Dangerous lies at worst.
In reality, most ideas are worthless. I can have dozens of ideas per minute, hundreds per hour. I can't even afford to record all of them, not to mention doing anything useful with them. And that's just my own ideas. If I wanted to listen to all ideas of the people around me -- to understand each one and evaluate them -- I'd be drowned in a huge noise. And no, they are not all old ideas repeated and rehashed -- they are all original like snowflakes, there are no two alike. And like snowflakes, there are gazillions of them, and new ones keep on coming.
In real life people work hard to protect against the flood of ideas. We carefully choose the friends to listen to and trust, the books and magazines to read. We run quickly past soapbox preachers on the street. We try to outsource the hard work of deciding what is a good idea by relying on others -- politicians, authorities, religious leaders.
So how is that people are willing to pay for ideas after all? We pay for books, we pay for schools, etc. Large corporation can pay huge sums of money for patents. Editors and movie companies pay for rights to publish works. What are they paying for?
Lets do a mental experiment. Imagine that you write a book, take the manuscript to a nearby editor, wave it in front of his nose and demand that he buys and publishes it. You would be laughed at, at best. Now, imagine that you also have a number of reviews from recognized authorities, or that you are a renowned author who wrote several best-sellers already. You see? What changed?
It's not the ideas that are valuable. It's the filtering of ideas that takes work and makes the ones that passed the test precious. It's the fact that an idea, one of zillions similar ones, has been proved in some way to be working, or at least promising.
This is why recording all the ideas you come up with, but don't care about or don't have time to realize is actually harmful to you and everyone around you. You have to select the few best ones and stand behind them, work on them, make your dreams into reality -- only then they gain value. No inventor would be famous today if all he did was just recording hundreds of his ideas. One of the more famous inventors, Thomas Edison, was in fact a businessman who took ideas of other people and realized them. Allegedly he had no original invention of his own in his whole life. He made the ideas valuable by working on them.
Remember, an idea is for life, not just for the Hogwatch!
(Partly just a test:)
What's Hogwatch?
From the Annotated Pratchett Quotations File, http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/hogfather.html
Plays on an old advertising slogan intended to discourage giving puppies as Christmas presents without thinking about how they'll be cared for the rest of their lives.
Compare also the motto for Lady Sybil's Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons: "Remember, A Dragon is For Life, Not Just for Hogswatchnight".
Hm, ... I agree and disagree.
I agree with everything about how we must make dreams real; It is not enough to just say, "I wish, I wish, I wish, ..."
At the same time, I think most successful inventors, (people who've actually made things that work,) keep inventors journals of ideas, concepts, machines, observations, and so on.
I mean, JamesCarleson at BucketWorks was just exploding with ideas all of the time, and he made plenty of things real, -- including Bucketworks itself..! That said, as a group, there came a point where they stopped writing ideas on the wall they'd set up for just that.
I agree with "pony up," and making sure that things are arising for real, but I wouldn't say, "Only dedicate yourself to the one idea." A lot of really great projects start out in the status of "a mess." I always envision that that mess includes little scraps of paper with half-scrawled micro-manifestos on them, and genius blueprints. Not that everyone works that way, though.
Ok, ok, not a single idea, but a couple of most promising ideas. Add new promising ones to the bunch, but then also kill the ones that sat there for too long without growing. Kill them, not offload to other people -- they already have enough of their own.
On the other hand, if you have an idea that is working and growing nicely, but you just want to pursue other things -- those are the ideas you can give to other people, preferably together with the resources you have accumulated for the idea.
Note that the inventor journals you mention are not just for recording the ideas themselves -- they are for growing them, making them more detailed and fleshed out -- for accumulating the knowledge and experience. You don't fill them in by daydreaming, you fill them by experimenting, gathering knowledge and generally working on them. Generally, they become more valuable as you find more evidence that they could work.
I think it's ok for an idea to start as general, or how you called it, a mess, as long as you are ready to devote labor to improve them. So you start with a whole family of ideas, and discard the ones that didn't or couldn't possibly work -- using both testing and intuition. As you do so, they gain value.
"...the inventor journals you mention are not just for recording the ideas themselves -- they are for growing them, making them more detailed and fleshed out -- for accumulating the knowledge and experience."
__ Yes! __ Hearty and strong YES on that one. Strong resonance.
This is one of the major conclusions I came to in working with notekeeping systems. In fact, I recently wrote: http://lion.posterous.com/revisiting-computerized-notekeeping
In particular, the emphasis on "Editing," and the notes on "Deleting."
Which reminds me, -- a way on archiving on CW would be great. This is something that we can fake without involvement by AlexSchroeder. (Just an "OldPage" actor note at the beginning of the page.) I should pull out the chunk on downloading and reworking CW as a DataBall, and making it possible to programmatically access the contents of the CW, -- deeper than just "get a page / set a page," -- into: "add this tag to that page," or, "find all the pages with tag foo," structuring the content on the page (perhaps using MachineCodeBlocks,) -- this way, we could experiment with "hiding" content, at least logically, that's old, and shaping the wiki as a whole.
Make a page of its own for possible experiments on CW as DataBall. Use that as the drawing board, then write Python code to fit.
. o O ( Perhaps mix with the TextVerse that I've been working on. )
I'm not yet sure about the effects of making your notes public -- publishing the not-yet-valuable ideas. Most of the journals that I have heard about were strictly private, partially because only the author could actually understand them.
An of course, behind the question about publishing lies an assumption that by publishing you gain something: a chance on collaborating on the idea growing, or at least filtering.
I'm sure that some pattern-language wikis, like C2, make it occasionally possible: by inviting people to share their experiences related to the topic.
I think everything that is on the web helps in the IncidentalCollaboration.
By making our thoughts visible on the web, people might not directly tell us something, but when they see our thoughts, and then other people's thoughts, and still other people's thoughts, and start drawing conclusions based on the similarity, and speaking to those thoughts, ...
I would post notes that people can't understand, because: SpeakingEdge does function. If you've read enough of something, you can read 2 paragraphs of an explanation, and, even though they're using words you haven't heard before, -- you can pick out enough to say, "Yeah, I know what they mean, I know what they're talking about." (CommonContext functions.) "They're about to say blah blah blah, and I'll bet they'll make up word X to explain it." And sure enough, you continue reading it, and there's word X, or something like it.
Because you've been going through the same types of logic that haven't been articulated yet, but the pattern is laid down in our minds. It is like "PreForm," but for the HiveMind.
(In fact, perhaps I should add "SocialPreForm" to DevelopmentOfThought.)
A really good book is: Myths of Innovation.
If you come up with 100s of ideas in an hour --
It may very well be that all of the ideas are "good." I don't see the "good/bad" success rate in terms of "...on a scale from 1 to 10," how good is this idea?
Rather, I see them more in terms of, "Do I have enthusiasm for this idea? Do I have the materials to make it happen soon? What are the first steps like? Is this idea combustable?"
If you're inspired, you can have a lot of really really great ideas. And they can all be good!
Like: I'm sure that Radomir, just in 5 minutes, can come up with at least 20 really cool images to draw.
And I think I'd like every single one of them. I think they're all good.
So, which one will become real? Maybe you'll use Tarot cards and dice to figure out which. :) Maybe one is speaking to you particularly, begging to be drawn. So that is the one that works.
So in this view, it's not so much about filtering, as it is about just making stuff.
I suppose it will be a while before I'm up to producing a drawing worth publishing. I didn't realize how easy it is to lose your edge. It's especially painful when you think you still can do it -- until you actually try. Oh well, back to practicing, I guess...
Yikes!
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