The ‘Great Ideas are Dime a Dozen’ Myth
There is a popular myth that great ideas are a dime a dozen (see here, here, and here). I don’t know what a great idea is. Is a Dick Tracey watch or a nuclear powered rocket a great idea? No, not if you don’t know how to implement them, then it is just a fantasy and unless you have plot with it, it is not even a good fantasy story. However, I do know what a great invention is and they are not a billion dollars a dozen. A great invention takes incalculable intellectual skill, years of training, years of hard work, and significant resources.
(At first glance I thought you said "leeching". LOL)
As with most Gulchers, the enthusiasm I have for what I do is contagious. The drive to know, understand, and then capitalize on that knowledge is innate in many of us, but it does need to be cultivated.
Getting promoted this year without government dependence and no tenure system was challenging, but worth it.
I have a few spare dimes... :)
If "great ideas" are so bountiful, I should be able to buy quite a few dozen and become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. If I had a dime for every guy who brought me his new golf putter, driver or other "sure fire" product to produce tooling for, that he thought would make him rich, I would be a major depositor in a bank in the Caymans... Usually when they realize the cost of development, tooling, production and how difficult/expensive it is to finance something others realize is not such a "great idea" they let it go. Those that don't, pay me and rarely see a good ROI. I do not discourage them. I do not know what the public will go for. Who can explain the pet rock, or the Chia pet?
True inventors are greatly outnumbered by dreamers.
Respectfully,
O.A.
We are all born tabula raza. A blank slate. However, some are given gifts. Jesse Owens was given a great athlete's body, but still, he worked his butt off to hone it into an Olympic winner.Mozart was born with a gift for music, Beethoven wasn't. Mozart wrote great mastewrpieces, but so did Beethoven, some say greater than Mozart. It's one thing to have an idea, even a great one, but it means nothing unless it's brought to fruition. The bringing it forth often entails hard work and sacrifice. Not sacrifice for others, but for oneself. Ayn Rand didn't sit down at her typewriter and zip off 1,000+ pages of Atlas. She worked and struggled over it, tweaking and honing until it was born, out of plenty of agonized sweat. Benz, it is said invented the automobile, but it didn't come into its own until Ford figured out how to mass produce it. No one, from Einstein to Bernstein ever created anything worthwhile without going through effort equal to the greatness of the product. Sometimes that effort occurs during the process, sometimes afterwards. But just like life, no one gets off the roller coaster without all the ups and downs.
http://www.google.com/patents/US3383858
I still have a have a copy of the June 1956 paper he wrote (with Mrs. E. C. Orr) for the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation, entitled:
Project Snooper: A Program for Reconnaissance of the Solar System with Ion Propelled Vehicles
It’s filled with details about ion currents, equations of motion, propellant properties for the various alkali elements, and so on.
In addition to his incredible brilliance and inventiveness in many fields, he was a kind and truly wonderful person according to everyone who knew him, including me.
Maybe the same should be that ideas are a dime a dozen, but great "zero-to-one" ideas are rare.
That's repeated this myth here. VR error. :)
And no, you don't have to be some genius to come up with a good and marketable and buildable idea.
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