Life is grand

Contrast are a dynamic group of web-developers in Ireland who are making people think. From what I see they are marketing themselves amazingly well and, I hope, inspiring others to Get Real (and do something.) They are the 37Signals of Ireland.

Part of their style is to lob a thought-grenade and see what it kicks up. This has benefits but it has problems too, primary being a steam-rolling over the nuances of the subject they are tackling.

Ideas.

The saying goes that ideas are worthless, it is the implementation that is worth something. Contrast decided to pick this old nugget up and give it some legs again.

There is some truth and reality in what they say. That having an idea is not going to get you anywhere, that a man must “applies his talents, connections, assets, efforts, knowledge and savvy to an idea to make value can generate wealth”.

Only in “the man that keeps his ideas to himself” do they make a contribution to the discussion. A man who sits on his golden eggs all his life is a poor man. Most of the time.

The argument is simply too simplistic, a bludgeon to a rapier. The man who sits on his golden eggs all his life and yet wisely manages an aura of “the idea guy” can make a fortune. You may detest this man but he is doing well for himself. The same man can sit on a million eggs and release just one to make his fortune.

Even in the harsh light of day are ideas worth more than le “Banque de Bullshit.”

Patent firms never develop ideas. They acquire them and license them. Worth billions.

IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Ford, VW, Porsche, you name it, patent pure ideas and then never develop them. They do it to protect their market, block an attack point and in doing so continue to make billions.

Mad Men stand in rooms and spout ideas they had in the shower. A flurry of underlings scuttle off and make money from the idea. The Mad Men then go onto another idea.

Companies hang on to those who can come up with ideas, make leaps of thought that others cannot. A thousand implementers they can hire from under any rock but the idea man they rarely find.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have read or heard an idea that has inspired me to go on to greater things.

You can apply process and well known formulae to implementation. You can educate implementers and recruit them from every school in the country. You cannot do the same for those who have ideas.

Ideas are art and chaos. They are often chance; right place and right time. Often it takes one idea to reach another idea. They arrive whole or half-formed, or it takes one idea to complete another.

You have nothing to implement without an idea.

And beyond the harsh light of day, ideas are hope.

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

- Thomas Jefferson

Ideas are memes and selfish genes.

I would meet Contrast half-way by saying there are too many people with ideas that go nowhere. Dreams, hopes, plans of world-domination that fizzle and pop. That ideas take determination and discipline. That people leap from half-completed idea to half-completed idea, never amounting to much.

Keep on getting real, Contrast. Keep on inspiring others with your ideas and your acceptance of other peoples ideas.

But ideas are not worthless. They are priceless and are to be used wisely.

[Update]
On reading this the next morning I see I was unfairly harsh on “implementers.” Saying “under every rock” is poor form. Ideas need implementers as much as implementers need ideas. A balanced world is what we should be working toward. Not one where ideas are valued at zero nor one where implementers are valued as expendable. Half of my day job is implementation of the other half of my day job, idea generation.
[/Update]