Sometimes you meet a person who self-identifies as an “idea generator” and, by that fact alone, asks for a place aboard an organization. Such people should be driven as far away from the organization as possible, for the following reasons.
First, there is no shortage of ideas, just as there is no need for a snow salesman in winter.
Second, having a ready-made idea or several ideas means nothing. Success comes only to those who have managed to carry out implementation and adoption. At these stages, an “idea generator” is completely useless.
Third, idea generators often exaggerate their productivity: the number of ideas generated per unit of time. The skeptical reader can step away from the computer for a minute and try, for starters, to write down at least five ideas for a popular mobile app. If you raise the bar to ten, it already turns into torture, resulting in no thoughts in your head at all.
It is known that all ideas are floating around in the air. It follows from this that an idea cannot be invented; it can only come to mind or not. Another experiment for the skeptical reader: take five minutes away from reading and find, in a search engine, any idea from the list compiled above. The reader will be pleasantly surprised by the “originality” of his ideas.
This is also the place to mention that there is no such thing as “stealing an idea,” because all ideas are floating around in the air, and also because having a ready-made idea in someone’s head means nothing. I invite the reader to steal an idea whose implementation will earn him billions of dollars: develop a device that lets you obtain more useful work than the amount of energy supplied to it. Good luck!
The reader will ask: “So how do you solve the problem of generating ideas when they are so necessary?” Very simply. Start a notebook, write down ideas that just come to mind. At work, at school, on vacation, on the go, standing, sitting, lying down. And write down ideas in an open window too. Let an idea come to mind just once a week. But later, when lots of ideas are needed, you can simply take the list and read out all the ideas, analyze them, choose a decent one, and get down to implementation.
Well, good implementation is a whole other story.