Thank You


03
Jul
MP

Searching for the true value of ideas

The Worthlessness of Ideas - Better Living Through New Media - David Seah

David Seah at Better Living Through New Media recently wrote an interesting piece on ideas and their value. I don’t know that I can be anywhere near as elegant as David in expressing myself but I’ve a few related thoughts I’d like to expand upon here.

In an earlier post, “Obsessing over lost ideas“, David had stated one-sidedly that ideas are worthless. In the context of his post I would agree with the point he was making. For me an idea that is not acted upon, not developed, or does not inspire some other action, thought, communication, or other idea, is worthless. I see it as a seed cast upon the rocks that dies, never to fulfill it’s potential. But that doesn’t mean we have to weep for all perceived “lost ideas”. We must keep in mind a few things concerning ideas:

In his most recent post, David stated that to him the worth of idea would be as a catalysts of action, communication, or community, and that a true catalyzing idea has to meet the following criteria:

It describes a specific reaction between resources yields some desirable result that can be applied in an existing process (physical or social).
It short-circuits our notion of how such reactions have occurred in the past, creating an order-of-magnitude lead over existing methods.
Our perception of the reaction is irreversibly altered, redefining conventional wisdom in the process.
And the most important criterion of all: We think it’s AWESOME. That’s the gut-check, where our intuition comes into play

Some ideas are worthless to begin with and all others can be made so by inaction. We should each have an effective filtering system to determine which ideas have promise. Then the value is not in the idea, but in what WE do with it.

Technorati Tags: ,


Posted on: Monday, July 3, 2006 at 9:58 am
Posted by: Earl Moore
Filed Under: Observations
Post Viewed: 333 views



You may also like to read:
  • Ideas alone don’t drive innovation
  • Firm Launches Visionary Search for On-line Photos
  • Not so relaxed (but still working)
  • Themes in recent posts: mind-mapping and digital photography workflow
  • Effective Internet Search Strategies

    • Bookmark and share:
    del.icio.us:Searching for the true value of ideas  digg:Searching for the true value of ideas  newsvine:Searching for the true value of ideas  furl:Searching for the true value of ideas  reddit:Searching for the true value of ideas

    Comments

    One Response to “Searching for the true value of ideas”

    1. Jamie Nast on April 16th, 2007 10:49 am

      Dear Shamanicmerf,

      You posted the Better and Better comment about an hour ago. I just happened to see this and wanted to encourage you.

      I sometimes have the same frustration around getting ideas out of my head and prioritizing (even though I’ve been using mapping tools since 1992).

      There is lots of good software out there, but in the meantime — don’t wait on the software for peace of mind. Just pull out some paper and gets your thoughts down! You can always transfer them to software later.

      If you want to see some examples of both hand-drawn and software-generated idea maps, you can go to http://ideamapping.blogspot.com/ or my website.

      Warm Regards,

      Jamie Nast
      Author of Idea Mapping (John Wiley & Sons, Sept 2006)

    Leave a Reply




    Bad Behavior has blocked 4160 access attempts in the last 7 days.