IDEAS: PART I (INCEPTION)-Ideas fuel progress
“Ideas run the world and people work for them.”
“I love it when a plan comes together,” was the famous closing line of George Peppard alias Hannibal Smith of the TV series; The-A-Team. “Tous est bien qui fini bien”, is a French saying I picked up from my dad that means “All’s well that ends well.” Nothing brings more satisfaction to the human soul than a plan well executed that finally becomes reality. We love to bask in our successes.
It is the joy of man to sit and reminisce over his achievements. We always picture the wealthy people of this world laying on a beach chair off the coast of some island sipping on some expensive beverage or native drink just staring into the sky in appreciation of how good life is. Of course that is often an exaggeration but you get where I’m driving at. When we drive our cars or use the bus, we are riding on someone’s accomplishments. When we walk into the stores or purchase something on line, what we are really spending money on is someone else’s idea that has eventually become manifest into some sort of physical object or solution that we can apply to our day to day activities.
The book in your hands or whatever device you are using to read it where at one point nothing but an idea. Nearly everything around you was at some point nothing but an invisible idea. No one saw them except for the person that fathomed the thought and the possibility of their existence.
With that assertion I can boldly say that ideas run the world. Ideas make our cars move, ideas run jets and space engines. Ideas run our country. The President or Prime Minister sits in the office but it’s the ideas that are fed to him that eventually influence his decisions and henceforth the decisions of everyone under him. Ideas can make or destroy your world.
Prior to September 11th 2011, someone in the camp of Al-Qaida had an idea. ‘let’s hijack some planes and rum them into buildings in the United States as a way of making our statement to the USA.” Unfortunately, who ever had that idea had influence and on that fateful day, the idea came to life much to the shock of the whole world. Thousands of lives were lost as a result of one terrible idea. The power of an idea in the mind can never be ignored any more than the power of a nuclear capsule in a nuclear power plant.
With that initial understanding, how then shall we define an IDEA? Much literature has been published around this subject and in my initial research I realized that the subject of ideas goes much deeper than the average person on the street can comprehend. From the days of Aristotle and Plato, philosophers have been at pains to explain what an idea really is and how ideas can be classified.
We will not endeavour to delve into a philosophical exercise of deciphering the deeper meanings of this, for the sake of this book we will simply define an idea as A THOUGHT. A mental of image of something that has not been physically manifested or fully developed for human use or application.
When it dawns on you that everything around you was someone’s idea, you might want to ask yourself when the world will start using and appreciating ideas that you generated. Are you going to pass through this life without bringing your ideas to life? What will be your contribution? In Ecclesiastes 9:11 wise King Solomon tells us ‘ I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’
From the way I see it, non is without excuse, opportunities will always be there, the question is will you be ready when it knocks? MOVE
IDEAS: PART II (IDEATION): Generating the idea
Rudolf Steiner sees ideas as ["objects of experience" which the mind apprehends, much as the eye apprehends light.] In Goethean Science (1883), he declares, "Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas."
In 2006 I was in a small town in Zambia’s Central Province called Kabwe volunteering as a Peer Educator with an organization that was then called Students Partnership Worldwide. It doesn’t take one to stay in that town for long to realize that there is very little positive recreation for young people available there. I had been brought up and schooled in this town from elementary school to junior high so it was not unfamiliar turf, I knew Kabwe like the back of my hand. However, I was in my early twenties when I got back there and my expectations were different. Also owed to the fact that I was coming from Lusaka, the Capital, buzzing and full of activity, the move to Kabwe felt like a downgrade to my social life. I should have known better after being away for close to 10years. After dad was sent back to Lusaka on yet another transfer, the family had to move and that meant that I would be completing high school and attend College in my birth city.
Most people leave Kabwe after completing high school or college and go to one of the cities to look for opportunities in life. Here I was back in the “Ghost Town” they called it.
Being the type that does not drink or go out clubbing, I found myself among the myriads of young people craving for some “clean fun”. I would often see young people, most of them in their teens frequenting drinking places and coming out in their numbers with a few of them holding bottles of bear in their hands. Most of these were just teenagers. Life was never like this in my teenage years, I’d think. So much had changed within the last decade.
What I saw simply broke my heart and birthed a heavy burden for change. These young people deserved better, I thought to myself.
I took a break that year and decided to go and visit my family. Dad had since retired and was now settled in the eastern part of the country, roughly ten hour journey from where I was.
It is there that I initiated the process of ideation. I would be going back to Kabwe in a few months and I was determined to do something about the lack of positive recreation in that town. My thinking was powered by the burden I felt for the young people in that town. For days I sat in my bedroom formulating ideas and brainstorming on what would be feasible and what would be not. I thought about the music that the young people were glued to, hip-hop music.
In 2006, from those brain storming sessions in my bedroom, the Holy Hip Hop Clique was born.
The above narration shows one of the many ways in which ideas are born. An idea is like a seed, once it hits your mind it is your responsibility to nurture it until it bears fruit. Later in this book we will delve further into how one can create a conducive environment for the nurturing and development of ideas, which is really what this book is about, but right now we want to focus on the genesis of ideas.
As in the scenario above, some ideas are birthed out of a burden to find a solution to a problem. The famous character of the McGuyver TV series played by Richard Dean Anderson was never lacking in ideas. He demonstrated that solutions lie all around us and we will find them when we look in the right places. Of course real life is never as easy to navigate as McGuyver may make it seem but the principle still applies, it is the people that are actively searching and asking the right questions that often bump into solution-laden ideas.
There are also some ideas that seem to appear out of nowhere, it’s as though a light bulb just went on in one’s head and they go like, ‘now why didn’t I think of that.’ Such moments of abrupt mental revelation are what we often refer to as light-bulb moments.
We can all think of a time when we had a light bulb moment in our lives, but often we never stop to think where the “light” came from. For the light to have made sense there must have been a “darkness” of some sort. Ignorance or lack of knowledge is often referred to as mental darkness.
Ideas are solutions to problems and challenges we face in life. It is a desire to overcame challenges and provide solutions that creates an environment conducive for ideas to be birthed. MOVE