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Idea Debt

jessicaabel.com

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Re: Idea Debt

#31

Post by radiorental »

xiaoma wrote: post #27

This is pretty stark contrast to James Altucher's "idea machine" concept. That's where you push yourself to come up with 10 ideas daily in order to build your "idea muscle" concept. Some days he'd come up with 10 ideas for one specific person or business. It seems a bit odd, but the guy did make millions repeatedly (after squandering 100% of his wealth, repeatedly).

Somewhat anecdotally...

At work, our team isn't the biggest bunch of sports fans so our shoot-the-sh1t talk is primarily fantasy start-up ideas.

We bounce the ideas off each other, critique them, laugh. Just in the last week;

I want to create a VR game that's sync'd to your music and you hook up your exercise machine to to move through the game. (inspired by a DIY post here on HN)

My boss has moved on from a device that will shut down every device in the house for family dinner onto some Medical thing he's 'working on' with a colleague.

It's all good fun, creative & social.

Re: Idea Debt

#32

Post by lucaspiller »

xiaoma wrote: post #27

This is pretty stark contrast to James Altucher's "idea machine" concept. That's where you push yourself to come up with 10 ideas daily in order to build your "idea muscle" concept. Some days he'd come up with 10 ideas for one specific person or business. It seems a bit odd, but the guy did make millions repeatedly (after squandering 100% of his wealth, repeatedly).

Having ideas is easy, but actually doing something with them is different story. Ok there is minor difference between a good idea and a bad idea, but going from getting a good-enough idea to actually doing something about it, and following the project through to completion, is the hard part.

Related:

https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-most-ridiculous-startup-...

Re: Idea Debt

#33

Post by rorykoehler »

danieltillett wrote: post #10

I love my idea debt. Not only are they a connection to my younger self, but old ideas are a rich ore to be mined for new ideas. Some of my best current ideas are old ideas that have been tweaked by experience or external change so they are now relevant. Keep working on your ideas, but make sure you are actually turning some of them into reality.

I find it amazing how many of the ideas from my vault exist in some form or other in the real world now.

Re: Idea Debt

#34

Post by rorykoehler »

amelius wrote: post #20

I wonder how this works for somebody like Elon Musk. Does he have idea debt?

Probably has tons of idea debt but he is also very single minded in what he wants to achieve so it's probably easier for him to discard ideas and only do the ones no-one else can do that will go some way towards saving humanity.

Re: Idea Debt

#35

Post by hueving »

rorykoehler wrote: post #33
danieltillett wrote: post #10

I love my idea debt. Not only are they a connection to my younger self, but old ideas are a rich ore to be mined for new ideas. Some of my best current ideas are old ideas that have been tweaked by experience or external change so they are now relevant. Keep working on your ideas, but make sure you are actually turning some of them into reality.

I find it amazing how many of the ideas from my vault exist in some form or other in the real world now.

This happens to many people. You encounter a problem or inefficiency and think up of some software or hardware that would make it better.

Re: Idea Debt

#36

Post by atmoz »

vog wrote: post #23
boothead wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems similar to the idea of a spark file? http://lifehacker.com/5941997/defrag-your-brain-with-a-spark... edit Also do you have anything written down about using org-mode for todos and ideas?

> This seems similar to the idea of a spark file? Indeed! The concept of a "spark file" describes exactly what I'm doing. > Also do you have anything written down about using org-mode for todos and ideas? This is pretty basic Org-mode usage. My To-Do list is just nested headings, each with a TODO or DONE marker (Shift+Left, Shift+Right). My IDEAS list doesn't even have those markers, it is just nested headings and ne…

What editor are you using?

EDIT: Nevermind: http://orgmode.org/

Re: Idea Debt

#37

Post by cdnsteve »

The post was a very nice read and hit a personal chord for me. I'm that guy that hoards domain names for all these amazing project idea's. I've started to organize projects into Trello boards, most important ones get their own project board and details start to get hashed out.

The funny thing is that I've flat out closed many boards, because I've lost interest or the idea doesn't seem to solve the problem any longer. That's OK. I think it lets me distill down the best ones for true idea investments. As long as it's full-filling and you learn something along the way, then why not?

Re: Idea Debt

#38

Post by drxzcl »

boothead wrote: post #14
vog wrote: post #4

This is why I moved a huge portion of my TODO list into an IDEAS list. This is an outliner document (Org-mode) that contains notes on lots of different ideas. So why didn't I just delete those items? Because writing down that stuff helps me not to think about it the whole day if I don't want to. The IDEAS list grows and grows, but that's okay. I don't feel obliged to implement any of these ideas. Whenever I recall an…

This seems similar to the idea of a spark file? http://lifehacker.com/5941997/defrag-your-brain-with-a-spark... edit Also do you have anything written down about using org-mode for todos and ideas?

Hah, I've done this for years! I'm glad it has a name now. I call mine "halfbakery.txt", but it's not very catchy.

Re: Idea Debt

#39

Post by ajuc »

IMHO the problem is talking. When you talk about your idea you receive big part of gratification for almost no effort.

Re: Idea Debt

#40

Post by MasterScrat »

danieltillett wrote: post #10

I love my idea debt. Not only are they a connection to my younger self, but old ideas are a rich ore to be mined for new ideas. Some of my best current ideas are old ideas that have been tweaked by experience or external change so they are now relevant. Keep working on your ideas, but make sure you are actually turning some of them into reality.

> Some of my best current ideas are old ideas that have been tweaked by experience or external change so they are now relevant.

I can't find the reference right now but it reminds me from a scheme from Feynman.

He would keep a few ideas he's very familiar with in mind. Then every time he would be exposed to a new concept, he would consider each of his "core" ideas in light of this new concept.

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