Just an Idea, Sirji!

Over the past few days I’ve had a thought, rather a train of thought, running through the grey-beige jelly that is my cortex which I shall now share for your reading pleasure. It concerns the uniqueness and originality of ideas and also how we derive inspiration and let them out into the world.

Have you ever wondered how unique your idea is? No doubt its original, true, but apply the rules of probability to the question of whether anyone else ever thought up the same thing and then it doesn’t seem that impossible. There are, after all, 6.8 billion people on this earth (citation required) and that’s not counting the dead guys – and there’s quite a few of them too.

It doesn’t take similar experiences to add up in one’s cranium and churn out the same brilliant, light-bulb-glowing, eureka-screaming, kiss-ur-lab-assistant-even-though-he’s-a-guy flash. Sometimes 2 completely dissimilar sets can intersect over the same domain that encompasses the region of interest of the idea. So be skeptical at first when someone has the same idea as you, but be not surprised. Rather curiosity into your counterparts thought process could bring valuable insight and open further avenues of exploration that build up to a wonderful collaboration.

But, it still remains that we aren’t all that egalitarian. A lot of work goes into fleshing out and detailing an idea to make it useful and it is only jus t that one be credited for one’s hard work. I believe that the easiest way to ensure this or to ‘lay one’s claim’, as it were, is to tell the world about it. Keep your work secret until you develop and build up to a certain level of credibility and then scream it out on the rooftops with a megaphone – the louder the better. It’s a time worn observation that the first to get the word out is the primary in getting credit. This helps in more ways than one – talking to the world about your idea can get you fresh eyed inputs that again offer novel perspectives that you may not have considered.

Come to think about it, the funny thing in this whole argument is that idea is self applicable. The idea that ideas aren’t unique itself may not be unique and by corollary is recursive to the point where it loses meaning.

To conclude I’ll just say this –any idea no matter how unique or novel to its ideator, could have been thought up by others at any other point on the globe and at any time in history, but the lack of technology, will to pursue it or just plain laziness may have prevented that idea from sprouting into the world.