Working in the ‘ideas industry- per se - you get attuned to seeing ideas everywhere.

Which is of course true. Except you don’t really see an idea, you rather feel it. You can of course visualise an idea, which is a different kettle of fish. But in their raw, abstract, mushy state, ideas remain to a degree undefinable.

If through the course of communicating your ‘idea’ you have to put it into words, you are doing so through the medium of language. Now, not all ideas can be described using either spoken or written language, or if attempted, may loose something in the translation. The same holds true if you choose the visualisation route.

Having to communicate an idea means we have to really think about what makes it an idea, and what will make sense to others when we then go on to describe it.

Some complex ideas are sometimes best described by using an analogy. Or alternatively, some ideas are discovered by observing another phenomenon that illuminates a new idea. I’m thinking here of Einstein standing at a fixed point with trams whizzing pass him, and the insight that gave him with his theory of time and relativity.

If you are getting my drift, ideas are tricky customers. They are not always easy to identify, describe and actualize, but nevertheless remain singularly (arguably) the most important ‘gift’ we can give to the wider world.

For every good idea there’s ever been (and likely to be) there’s a bad one standing alongside it. All that Ying &Yang stuff, darkness and light. One spawns the other.

I’m just about to embark on Peter Watson’s latest door-stop of a book ‘The German Genius’ http://amzn.to/b5z8du Reading the introduction I came across this interesting fact. Up to the mid-1930’s nearly half of all Nobel prize winners were German. It doesn’t take us long to figure out the significance of that fact, and what happened in Germany during the decade after the mid-1930s. Centuries of genius can be overshadowed by a decade, or so of, well, dark, dark, dark, ideas. The German Genius is still recovering today.  

As an antidote to such dark musings, elsewhere in the book, I came across a quote that also encapsulated the notion of genius being a freelance occupation:

“The Allies won the war because our German scientists were better than their German scientists”.

As I am often heard to say, “A good ideas can come from anyone and anywhere”.

Just make it a ‘good’ one.