The ideas are out there... waiting to be harnessed. We just have to make the time to brainstorm, to talk, to have dinner, and in the process, to capture all those ideas we generate but usually disregard for whatever reason.
This article made me think about how I always come up with various random ideas, and a year or so later, someone else comes up with the same idea and does something with it (think about it...how many people wished for seat warmers in their cars before someone just sat down and decided to make it happen?!). Some ideas are just sitting there waiting for someone to call them out and make them real... at least, that's what Malcolm Gladwell is implying in his latest article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell
How many dinosaur bones are we all walking over without seeing them?
Tracy Cote
Strategists & Planners
Comments (2)
Once again, it seems Gladwell takes a commonsense idea (some people know more people than other people, and can influence a group, in Tipping Point; your instinct is right...except when it's wrong, in Blink), and tries to make it into a deep fundamental truth. His premise here seems to be that dinosaur bones were hard to find in the desolate west for a hundred years. Then a wealthy guy comes in with "teams of 50 people" and "modern scientific equipment" and spend months, if not multiple summers, looking for bones. Surprise, surprise they find a lot of them. Please, Malcolm---tell me something new. AND, in two years, if I see this perfectly good short article inflated to book size by needless padding (like Tipping Point was), I just might have to toss a copy of Struck and White" "The Elements of Style" thru the shop window.
Posted on September 11, 2008 09:39
p...i have to say...sometimes the simplest ideas are the most interesting. i have been thinking about this article for days and have come to some interesting (to me, perhaps banal to you) observations. now, that doesn't mean i need to write a book about them but hey, maybe i am missing a bet. one thing i have been chewing on after reading this...the whole concept of certain ideas are ready to be "discovered" at a certain time. possibly trite but certainly true. gladwell illustrates this with the story of the phone, as many have done before him in various contexts. i can think of a hundred little illustrations of this in everyday life, and i think it has to do with people's "ambient awareness" (to quote the recent wsj article about twitter). for example, my husband became obsessed with ukelele's about 4 years ago. a couple of years later, they became trendy. tonight, he decides rye is cool. dollars to donuts, within a year or two, rye will become the drink du jour. i wouldn't be too quick to dismiss gladwell. he might not say anything you don't already know, but he is saying something a lot of people haven't actually articulated...even though they might be thinking it!! (i will grant you though, the whole "you might be right, except when you're wrong" thing in blink did make me nuts, as much as i enjoyed the book).
Posted on September 11, 2008 23:17