Ideas need to be shared.
Each September, we build a stage for our speakers.
From there they tell us their stories, their struggles, their beliefs, they tell us about their incredible energy to keep going when common sense says to stop.
But more than that, they tell us their ideas.
They tell us the thinking behind thinking different.
And, if we are smart, we can listen like we have never listened before.
Because to think different, it helps to know how others arrived at their answer.
What we find about the best ideas is that they don’t make a lot of sense at the beginning, the resistance to them is great, and they are a little bit wonky.
They do not follow a linear path, they break a rule or two, they are sometimes so obvious that we cannot understand why no one else saw it.
Yes, ideas can be trademarked, patented and secret formulas can be locked in a safe, and that will always happen. But when open source ideas get shared, interesting things happen.
They can be improved upon. They can be de-bugged. They can be tested in the real world. They can be dismissed by the crowd (warning, lots of great ideas don’t pass this particular test). They can be criticized, they can be trashed, or they can be adopted as if there had never been another way of doing it.
Ideas are the future. Ideas change things. Ideas are exciting. And if one idea doesn’t work, then there is always another idea that just might.
But above all, in this super connected world, they need to be out there.
They need to be shared. They need airplay.
Their destiny will be decided by the brilliance of the idea and nothing else.
