Oct 11
2
Sitting on Good Ideas
A few weeks ago, I was listening to “This Week in Google” podcast episode and heard about a new Twitter-based service that was launching a private beta. The service was finding a new way to connect people through their tweets, whether they were followers of each other or not. Most people would say “cool” and try to sign up. I said “well shit”, sat down, and moped.
This was the exact idea I had devised and even started to prototype about two years ago (using an alternative approach to Twitter). It was the exact idea I’d then got frustrated by, got “too busy” for, then decided to safely put aside knowing that it was such a great idea it could only have ever come from my brain. And now someone else had been first to make it work.
It wasn’t the first time. One of my iPhone app ideas had been announced as a standard feature for iOS 5 months earlier. Last year, one of my screenplays-in-progress had many of its elements brought to life in a little movie that no one saw called “Inception”. It was just another in a string of my thoughts that I’d never realized, but someone else had. Mostly because I had done the worst thing possible with my good ideas: very little.
So, if you get a good idea, and care about it, do something.
Your good idea could be a new business venture, an iPhone app or website, a script idea or blog post topic. It could be the good idea to finally marry your long-time girlfriend (ahem). Good ideas can only become tangible things when they are acted on, and only if you’re very lucky will you not find your idea brought to life by someone else first if you choose to wait. Even the most original idea will occur to someone else on the planet. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Probably many people.
So when it hits you, if you care about it, give your good idea some attention.
Hypocrite note: it took me four weeks to write this post.