ADVICE: Give Away Your Ideas & Take A Load Off
By Steve Poland • September 12, 2007
Seth Godin has a post up about giving away ideas and how execution is the real hard part. It’s the truth.
Personally, giving away ideas is like therapy for me — or rather, a necessity. My Mom has had the perfect analogy so far for me — it’s as if I’m in the bottom of a well, and it’s filling up with water (”ideas”). If I don’t scoop the water (”ideas”) out of the well (”my mind”), then I’ll drown. And that has happened — I find myself being pulled by 3 ideas that I’m “saving” and I can’t focus on any one of them! Then it’s torture for me, because I know I can’t execute on all of them.
Trust me, I still have tendencies to hold onto ideas — I have a few at the moment that I haven’t shared for months, because I’m “saving” them. How do you, as a reader of my blog, know when I’m saving ideas? When there are post droughts — because I’m drowning in the couple ideas I’m really excited about that I think could be “the one”, don’t share them, and they block the rest of my creativity.
But all this sharing has really helped me to better identify opportunities, in my opinion. It also brings out some great comments on the idea posts that makes me (and others) realize something that I/you weren’t even thinking about.
So those ideas you’ve been holding onto the past 6 months that you’re never going to execute on anyhow, write ‘em out — you’ll feel a lot better. Hell, you might even find someone as interested as you are in it (if you find that there really is an opportunity for the idea), and you may find your future business partner!
If you’d like to share any with my readers as a guest post, email it to me — I can’t guarantee I’ll post it, but feel free to send my way.
[via James Kirk]
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Comments
5 Responses to “ADVICE: Give Away Your Ideas & Take A Load Off”
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Thanks Steve. 6 months? Hell, I’ve got some I’ve been hording for years! And I just cleaned out my file and had to 86 several that had either been done by someone else, or that technology advancements had simply made obsolete. No more, however. I think I’ve a handle on what drives me and my creativity, and as you’ve so elegantly stated in your post above, I need to start scooping the water!
So instead of me IMing you my ideas, can I just login to your Wordpress and post them myself?
I’ll keep them in draft mode, until you approve them. I can think of a few right now…
And I’m donating $1 to TechquilaShots and emailing you the above photo, sans-watermark. Merry Christmas
The well analogy works well for me. It is often the stupid or trivial ideas that fill your mind when traveling, sleeping, watching tv. Capturing them in a notebook or a blog stops them dominating the thoughts, and can entertain others.
I often hope that someone will take the idea and implement it so that I can become a customer. That won’t happen if the idea stays in my head. And, given that most ideas fail, I’d rather someone else put the work and risk in. Lazy huh!
My thinking goes something like this… “This product/service is really needed and if I can just get it going or get someone else to invest in it, I can make lots of money.” Then, nothing happens and years later, the idea has been done and someone else has made the millions anyways. (And probably others have spent millions because it wasn’t executed properly).
Is there an Idea ThinkTank that I can join to submit my ideas for brainstorming and development; where companies will actually pay for the fleshed out ideas? Perhaps this is a business idea in itself… the ThinkTank takes a percentage of revenue and then distributes it to all members who helped problem-solve it.
I just want to make money on these thoughts (even if it is just a half-percent of revenue).
Seriously, companies could really benefit from something like this… I think I have a great idea for 3M… anyone know someone who can make something happen there?
Thanks for letting me share… I will continue to share these if anyone is listening.
James
I know how to solve the water shortage. (Now how to I explain in 25 words or less?)
The minimum necessary background facts are: 1) Heat is like water in that it wants to be in equilibrium, 2) heat flows from high to low, and 3) heat travels by radiation, conduction, and convection.
Knowing those facts, there are ways to encourage heat flow one direction while discouraging its flowing the other.
For example, the dew pond is a passive device that harvests water out of air. Invented during the Neolithic, some dew ponds built then are still producing today.
In its original form the dew pond was a clay or chalk membrane installed over a straw liner. On calm, clear nights a dew pond can experience a two or three inch rise in the water level. Everybody has a pet theory about why dew ponds work, but nobody denies that they work. I opine that the clay liner radiates its heat into the night sky, while the straw liner prevents the heat being replenished by conduction from the earth.
Variants of this idea are used to irrigate trees in Afghanistan and melons in China. During the Dark Ages, dew ponds provided water for the people and livestock of fortified hilltop villages in England. During the Crusades knights built siege ponds inside their castles. The Scottsdale, AZ, Pond Roof House is heated and cooled by this principle. “Bridges May Be Icy” signs point out a spot where the principle regularly works. And every morning the dew spots on your windshield testify that it really does work.
Neolithic man did not have access to modern materials, but he built ponds that provided reliable water for “300 sheep and 20 bullocks”. Since we know that sheep need about two gallons per day, we can infer that the dew pond described by “The Naturalist on the Thames” produced about 600 gallons per day. What we don’t know is the size of the dew pond that he was describing.
We get better information from a 1922 Popular Science article that describes S.B. Russell’s patented “dew reservoir” as reliably producing about 75 gallons per day in winter and 150 gallons per day in summer. The dew reservoir was 30 feet by 30 feet. If we arbitrarily assign it a 90 gallon per day average production and divide that by 900 square feet of reservoir, we learn the device is capable of harvesting a tenth of a gallon per day per square foot. Extending the calculation, a tenth of a gallon every day for a year is 36 gallons or four point something cubic feet. That means a one-acre dew reservoir style collector would produce four acre-feet of water per year.
Current state-of-the-art makes this water too expensive for irrigation, but water is like electricity; it gets more expensive during peak demand.
I’ve built three prototypes. One actually worked a little bit.
I’m afraid I’m going to die without sharing this. Please take it and run.