Ideas for '09

merlin:

I asked people on the Twitter to Toot me their ideas for projects I should do in 2009. Lotta yuk-yuks, a few B-minuses, and several bits of shiny gold.

My Five Six Favorites

Remy: - redesign the concept of how a technology conference/expo should run so that they’re not such a waste of everyone’s time. Balut: Write about how successful late-bloomers with diffuse, vague, or conflicted interests managed to find their special niche. jdickerson: Write a novel or book & also write abt process to chart creativity,focus, attention, mastery, etc. Or u do one; I’ll do other Remiel: Obsess Out Loud ‘09, live-broadcast symposium: (anti-)Thought Leaders (Hodgman, Gruber, more) talk about Creating Well, Often stevewhitaker: if you’re serious: I’d love to hear a series of interviews you do with people whose work you admire/appreciate. justinlilly: I would like to see more video production. Things like wallet-guy are quite nice. I also enjoyed the video of ylnt.

By Way of Consensus

And my gut check on what people like that also interests me:

• write a book
• do more You Look Nice Today (and in different flavors)
• revive The Merlin Show
• just go do something cool

You Rock

Thanks to everybody who chimed in. I’m grateful you’d share your ideas with me. Here’s hoping we all throw down some good stuff in the aught nine.

[(Nearly) all responses below.]

I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can’t generate. Life becomes stagnant.

― Rufus, from “Dogma” (via affremblequotes)

I don’t think creativity is coming to an end. I think creativity is increasing at an increasing rate, and always will.

Creativity is generally a combination of existing ideas. If there were only two concepts in the universe, creativity would be “What happens if we put them together?” If you add a third and fourth concept to the universe, the number of creative combinations shoots up.

The Internet allows you to check the originality of your idea quickly, so it sometimes seems that all the good ideas have been taken. But the Internet also seeds us with many more concepts than we would otherwise be exposed to. Humans are like distributed computing for creativity. The Internet and the media and our daily lives dump huge volumes of raw concepts into our heads and we process and combine things until something new feels right.

Worrying comes from predicting the future on a straight line, imagining trouble increasing at some established pace. But the real future comes in leaps and bounces, with creative solutions expanding faster than problems. I believe this is some sort of fundamental law of the universe, that solutions will always outpace problems.

Take a deep breath. You’re going to be fine. Someone, somewhere, just thought of an idea that will fix everything. And you couldn’t stop it if you tried.

― Scott Adams (via peterwknox)

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but rather, ‘hmm…, that’s funny…’

― Isaac Asimov (via pterodactyls)

Business idea: some sort of business. Step one: hire an ideas guy.

― Avery Edison (via bullshit)

Most people seem content just to post cat pictures and get on with their day. I think I need to let go of this notion that every blog post I make has to be some ground-shakingly new idea that, oh my goodness, probably nobody’s ever had before.

―

Steven Frank (via marco)

this used to be me on wordpress.  i’ve learned not to force it anymore.