Good Idea!

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. - David Allen

..... Play your cards if they are good, don't fold 'em.

Rating Ideas

A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night. - Marilyn vos Savant

  May you have many sleepless nights!

Legacy

The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind. - John Allston

  Don't bother leaving things; ideas are immortal.

Amputee

If you don't have a leg to stand on, you can't put your foot down. - Dave Weinbaum

Remain well-grounded in reality.

Censure

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the insidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood. - Tryon Edwards


True of censure of others but not true of censure of ideas.

Stretched Minds

A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Keep on strechin'

Visionaries

The difference between visionaries and dreamers is that visionaries make the dreams come true. - Walter R. Mueller

May you make all your visions come true.

Manipulation Prone

There are habits and activities that leave people open to manipulation. I'm not saying they are wrong or right, just pointing out that these behaviors make you open to being manipulated... Here are a few general categories of behaviors that manipulators seek out:

Believing something because you heard someone say it on a news show on cable TV.

Being a child (or acting like one).

Buying penny stocks.

Repeating a mantra heard from a figurehead or leader of a tribe without considering whether it's true.

Trying to find a short cut to lose weight, make money or achieve some other long-term goal.

Ignoring the scientific method and embracing unexamined traditional methods instead.

Focusing on (and believing) easily gamed bestseller lists or crowds.

Inability to tolerate fear and uncertainty.

Focus on now at the expense of the long term.

Allowing the clothes of the messenger (a uniform, a suit and tie, a hat) to influence your perception of the information he delivers (add gender, fame, age and race to this too).

Reliance on repetition and frequency to decide what's true.

Desire to stick with previously made decisions because cognitive dissonance is strong.

Inability to ignore sunk costs.

Problem saying 'no' in social situations.

- Seth Godin

Add this to the mix of ideas to understand why the Doom-and-Gloom message is so effective.

Idea's Worth

An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it's not worth it. - Joel Spolsky


I agree with the second sentence but would ague with the rest.

Power Unbalanced

Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted. Good ideas come with a heavy burden. Which is why so few people have them. So few people can handle it. - Hugh Macleod


The easiest one to convince is the one who will most benefit from the shift of power. 

Full Tilt Crazy

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough. - Niels Bohr


You might find this quote useful when people think your idea is crazy!

Enemy of Humanity

Terrorists are enemies of humanity, not just of a particular culture.

Big Ding

I want to put a ding in the universe. - Steve Jobs

He has.

Geek Man Talking

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as "suits." - Paul Graham


Yeah, but it impresses the ladies.

Stealing Ideas

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. - Howard Aiken


Customers pay for, not steal, the embodiment of a great idea.

Getting Stopped

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me. - Ayn Rand


The question is; how am I going to be stopped?

What To Do With Good Ideas

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. - Grace Hopper


The key is knowing if it is a good idea.

Augmented Post

Sometimes I have more to say. From a previous post:


We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. - Maria Montessori 

Remember Computer Science is indeed a science.


I started at the university in 1967. In my General Engineering class we were privileged to have a class or two using the spiffy new analog computer. It had a bunch of op-amps, capacitors, resisters, voltmeters (analog dials of course), an osciiiscope and a patch panel not unlike the first telephone operators had with wires you could strech from device to device. It was by way of these wires that you "programmed" this computer. This machine had no memory as such - if you don't define a voltage across a capacitor as memory.


About this same time a lab partner had access to the IBM 1600 which was in the basement of the engineering bluilding. It consisted of three upright piano sized units; card punch, card line printer, card eader/cpu. Output  of the cpu was by way of punched cards. It , if I remember correctly, had 1,400 bits of core, was programmable only in asembly language via punch-cards.


There was a debate going on at the time: digital or analog? Analog computers were pretty good at solving differential equations. While they were a little short on accuracy they at least provided an answer; digital machines like the 1600 just didn't have the RAM needed to provide any answer at all. (Even in 1972 I took a grad course on Numerical Methods where the text book was "Numerical Methods that (usually) Work". No kidding!). Four years later (1971) the CDC 3300 and the computer department had its own building and there was a terminal in every building on campus. Needless to say the CDC 3300 was digital. The argument had been settled. The 3300 had something like 56k of RAM and was as slow as bejesus if there was more than a few dozen users on at any one time. If your program used many resources you would have to submit it to run overnight.


By that time I was working for EPA and we were also using the IBM 360 in Bethesda Maryland (at NIH). We used our card reader and 300 bit/second modem to submit jobs using JCL (Job Control Language) the most arcane, frustrating, evil, operating system ever devised by demons - I mean humans. If the card reader didn't fail then your JCL probably would and it would take a day to find out. I firmly believe the reason there are so many religious people in the world is because of JCL and card readers. Talk about the power of prayer! One got to where anything was worth a try! 


But I digress. My point here is we didn't have a clue what was going to become of the computer industry. We could not conceive of the utility of a personal computer. Gigabyte was beyond our imagination (I don't even know if the word existed at the time). There were very, very few who had the imagination to even hazard a guess at the future of computing. Most were science fiction writers and they were dismissed as crackpots out to make a buck writing fiction.


Pay attention to the crackpots. Don't swallow everything they say but somewhere within all that noise may be a fragment of an idea that may change the future.

Argument or Discussion?

Argument is to find out who is right,

Discussion is to find out what is right. - Unknown

Perhaps this is why there are so many arguments and so few real discussions. In a discussion you do not defend yourself just your perspective. In an argument you try to prove the other wrong.

(Other post on Ideas)

The Devil is Fine

Uninvite the devil's advocate, since the devil doesn't need one, he's doing fine. - Seth Godin


Don't let the devil crash your best ideas.


(Other posts on Ideas)