“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, shows us that things take time to develop. We may find ourselves one day to be bankrupt when in truth, if we care to look back, we would find that it had been happening for a long time.
The same is true of good ideas, those that are turned into commercially successful products. They seem to pop up from nowhere overnight and everyone wonders why they hadn’t thought of it. Some do, but that is very rare. Most ideas take a long time to develop. They develop slowly and then suddenly.
Part of this is that in itself an idea is nothing. Ideas are cheap and everyone can have them. What is hard and takes time is changing the ideas into reality. Not only has the idea to be realised into a tangible thing but it has to be available at a cost point that the market is prepared to pay. Thinking about something and making something are different things.
Even then there is more to do. Your idea needs to be sold, conceptually and physically, and once off the ground needs to be financed, marketed and distributed. It is a rare person indeed who holds all of these skills and so one of the main reasons that ideas take so long to get up and running is that there are so many people to speak to, to enthuse, to persuade and to excite.
We tend to think that there is one person behind great ideas, a lone genius yet this is simply not true. Bringing ideas to fruition is very much a team sport and takes great effort by all concerned which is why the vast majority of ideas remain just that.
There are ideas that I have been working on for several years now. Gradually they are falling into place. One day I hope to look back and see how suddenly they arrived
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 