Matt Legend Gemmell: Makers and Takers
Matt Legend Gemmell: Makers and Takers
Here’s what I think:
In the world, there are many people with any given skill. Once in a while, one of these people:
- Has a great idea, and
- Creates something great based on it.
When this happens, the other people in the world with that same skill look at it, acknowledge its greatness, but then ask themselves:
Why didn’t I do that first? I possess the same skill, and I consider myself competent enough to have created the same thing. Clearly, the only difference here is that I didn’t have the idea.
And thus begins the misplaced importance on ideas rather than creations.
But people who think this miss a crucial fact: we all have many ideas, all the time, some of them even great ideas1; but most or all of them, we do not follow through with to create something. We let these ideas slip away, perhaps unattempted, perhaps even unwritten–forgotten.
Thus, the idea is not what makes the difference; but we want to think so, because to think otherwise would be to acknowledge our constant, ongoing failure to create great things based on those ideas. And the notion of that failure is too much to bear.
We all crave success, and as is typical of the flawed intuition of us humans, we seek a rationale that leads to the simplest path to contentment: all you have to do is have a great idea, right? And, as it turns out, that’s easy.
It is this poor rationale that has dogged us, as a people, throughout history, until it led to the patent system.
- In my mind, the Minority Report on this entry suggests that there might exist people to whom ideas do not regularly occur to them, and thus, to whom, ideas seem like precious currency; which would result in me drawing entirely different conclusions. The remainder of my mind insists that such people could not possibly exist. This is what I consider optimism. ↩︎