Sunday, December 10, 2006

Keeping track of mania's ideas

A few posts ago BiPolar Bear asked the following question:

"when these zillions of ideas rush into your mind...is it possible to pick a pen and start to write two or three?"

Absolutely. From years of experience I have mastered "idea capture". Most of the time I used to use a dictaphone. When these manic idea storms hit, I'd keep the dictaphone on me 24/7, and just babble the ideas as they came. If no dictaphone - then page and pen. When calm returned I'd dutifully transcribe all these ideas into whichever of the 200 lists in my system it corresponded, and then dutifully rank the ideas ( an ongoing project). To rank them I use the sort function in Excel and have created a Macro so they rank with one click. And to be sure, if I mine these ideas there's nuggets of gold therein.

But capturing my ideas is not my problem. My problem relates to another comment BiPolar Bear made futher on in his post. After you've remembered the ideas, he said:

"can you refer to them and complete them when your mind calms down?"

NO! Absolutely not. There's just too damn many of them and they're just too damn ambitious. Like I said, it would take the whole Chinese army 11 years to implement them. In fact, it is often the sheer weight of these ideas that contributes to the downs following the storm. I sit looking at the 567 items on the TO-DO list and it just kinda overwhelms me, to the point that I give up and crawl into bed.

What I really need to do is sell the damn things. I know that, given the right financial and technical backing, a lot of these ideas could fly real high (and I'm saying this in a fairly down-beat mood right now). I've had countless conversations with patent lawyers. Scoured the net. Tinkered around with NDAs and Non-circumvention agreements. But ideas are just about impossible to sell.

As George Bernard Shaw once said:

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."


5 comments:

  1. How true it is to recognize the flight of ideas yet how difficult to implement. I get accused of being lazy during my down time (which is every morning) but not much said on the strength of the stuff I want to. I recently completed one of my ideas from start to finish and it was incredibly satisfying. I can be brilliant yet nearly too tired/down to try. Well, now I don't feel so alone.

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  2. thank you very much BPG for your comprehensive answer .
    I'm sure you'd become extremely rich if you could choose just one or two of your fantastic ideas and working on them a little bit more and turn them to a more implementable plan , then you could sell them for sure.

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  3. Good news everyone (I am in a Futurama phase) . The comment I posted up last week about the Googlewhackblatt word “crypaesthetic” now no longer maintains that status as it is has a Google hit for that comment in BPG’s blog!

    I have posted the word up in Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:List_of_protologisms#c


    Spread the word!

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  4. ah
    so what is with the other source?
    im excited

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  5. Perhaps that's why so many bipolars have found success producing works of art. Now those are ideas that sell!

    ReplyDelete

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