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:

• All ideas are not created equal. There are some ideas that spark great achievement and invention and others that can never result in anything.
• Ideas are not morally bound. Mother Theresa had an idea about lessening the suffering of the poor and Hitler had an idea about creating a super race.
• Even the same idea can have varying results. David gave an example of graphic art students and how they use a similar idea resulting in very different results. On a larger scale I would give the example of the original idea of nuclear energy. One person may have seen it as a source of cheap and abundant energy while someone else saw it as a terrifying weapon of mass destruction. Who’s right?

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: Ideas, Inspiration