By Mark Fisher
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Good Ideas
Lost in the Stars
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I get a lot of ideas some good, some bad. Of course the first place to go after you get an idea is to the Internet, and usually a quick search will show that I’m not the first person to have that idea. Sometimes it seems thousands of people have thought it up before me, and that’s just from the ones that decided to put it out on the Internet. There must have been many more that, like me, never bothered to mention it anywhere Google can reach.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that my ideas are already taken. A few years back I read the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki in 2004. In that book, the author explained that sometimes when we take all the ideas a group of people have and average them together we often get a better idea than any one idea alone. Of course we still have to watch out for “the madness of crowds” (See “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay, 1841). I’d say Beanie Babies and Justin Bieber were never good ideas.
When you go out and find that you’re not the first person to think of something, you now have options. Look at several ways people have approached your idea. Sometimes it can be hard to find independent ones since folks will copy from each other. Look at the best features of each way of doing it and combine pieces of each one until you get what you think is going to work the best. You had the idea (too) and you can still make it your own.
So have your ideas, then head out to Pinterest or Instructables or search the whole Internet. Take the idea and run with it. When you’re done, you’ll likely have something new; maybe not completely new like you might have thought at first, but yours will likely be a bit different. Decide whether you’re going to want to share it or maybe add your two cents to all the other options out there for the next person to consider. Definitely stand back and admire what you’ve done.
Well, I think now’s the time for me to go out and look up “licorice ice cream”. I bet that’s been done. I wonder what I could make of that?
Send me an email at mathnerde+loop@gmail.com. Or you can comment on my blog at http://mathnerde.blogspot.com/.
