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On giving away ideas

Successful designers just send out their vision to the world; and then, when somebody else builds on it, that’s okay. They’re not protective of their ideas because they’re so used to having ideas. A creative designer has an idea a minute. Publicizing an idea is a way to improve on the idea—someone else can build on it, expand it. If you’re fluent with ideas, as most design people are, you don’t have to be fearful. You don’t protect your one good idea because your afraid you’ll never have another good one.

– David Kelley in Bringing Design to Software, chapter 8

Lets assume this is true. The next step is to ask ourselves, what happens to people that keep the ideas to themselves. I have a theory of what happens to them. They start losing their ability to produce new ideas, since their current idea preoccupies them. They think about it all the time to the point that they can not think of anything fresh.

So in order to avoid that, I will try to to blog more my ideas and visions about things I would like to see in the world. This will also enable me to test opposite theory that states that there is only limited amount of ideas that one can have and I will run out of them.

2 responses to “On giving away ideas

  1. Sharing ideas indeed can cause that someone uses them… but that is good… it means the idea was worth realizing… it also means that your ideas start changing the world around you… and “upgraded world” is a good start for new ideas. Things are changing faster and faster… it’s not important what you know… it’s important how fast can you adopt… and sharing all your knowledge is a great way for getting better.

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