The cost of an idea

Perhaps reopening a desire to get ideas out can start with an idea about ideas.

As friends of mine know I have a mind whirling around in circles, the gears spinning though whether any work is being done is debatable. Frankly this project may help determine whether there is anything of value in those ideas. And that gets at the point of this monologue, what is the cost of taking an idea and writing it down? What is the cost of having the idea and what do you give up?

First off these are my musing, so the first cost is that they are not well documented mathematical proofs. As soon as you write an idea down and put it out there you have the huge cost of feedback. We all hear about how feedback is good for us and our ideas, and frankly as somebody who enjoys innovation, feedback is necessary for ideas to be developed into something bigger and more robust. But that opportunity for improvement comes with the cost of recognizing the things you know you should have seen. It comes with the fact that medium isn't the message you meant to send either and the misunderstanding or misappropriation of your idea that comes from feedback of others. How many times have we in speech found ourselves saying, "That isn't what I meant!" yet in writing an idea now that is even easier to find ourselves dealing with. Taking on that uncertainty is a cost to many a potential writer or visionary and the size of the audience you can deal with is certainly an even bigger issue in this day and age.

How do you deal with that criticism, especially if you want warranted criticism to improve your idea. Yet at the same time taking every critic to heart is a short way to shattering your ego and confidence in yourself. How do you recognize the good in what you've done and go through the criticism for the nuggets that help you develop or improve on the idea. There is a cost to divorcing yourself from it all and wading through the muck for the gems that really improve what you are doing. Don't underestimate them. Frankly this first set and the costs associated with it are enough that I am amazed that anybody is still willing to put their ideas out there. And perhaps the answer is to treat even the things in the public space of the internet as your own internal thoughts. Something for you, all the criticism and other comments are simply there but not of any concern. Perhaps if you want you might go through them but only after the agony of getting the idea out is done.

And that leads into the second cost, though as with most of my thoughts, it is a little backwards because it comes first. That is the cost of taking your idea, your thought and compressing it into the words that constitute language and writing. Our brains don't think purely in words but rather in concepts, feelings, emotions and images. In sensations, smells and pure experience an idea becomes richer than any single medium, even reality itself, can truly encompass. And yet to get an idea out in all that glorious splendor requires you to take it and leach it of those vibrant tones so that it can be put down on paper. All those concurrent elements of the idea, like a massive troupe engaged in an intricate dance, must be taken and instead lined up one after the other, ordered so that your readers can engage with them one after the other. Despite the fact that our brain encompasses it all at once, and in fact rotates through elements of it flitting back and forth like a butterfly amongst flowers, how we put ideas together is ordered and straight forward. Seeing your idea laying upon the page devoid of those brilliant tones is disheartening. The cost of laying it out and knowing you didn't quite get it right, well at least for me, is enormous. Perhaps if I could, or if I did that it would shine just a little brighter.

I think the other cost associated with an idea is the incompleteness of it all. Ideas exist along with everything else around them. Both of the other costs might be considered a piece of this. In capturing an idea you have to tear it out of the area around it and focus your vision down to just that one element. How do you ensure it has that meaning.

So like many characters I've read, I think this got away from me. And so I hit that cost again of not wanting to put the idea out there in both the glorious element that it is versus how you want to see it be? Well perhaps I'll leave this one as it is and encourage others to pay the cost of putting an idea down. An incomplete idea is a cost we all must pay because sometimes there isn't enough space, time or words to finish it. Yet that very incompleteness can be itself an idea that helps give context. So with that. On to other ideas.