My Best Idea

I’ve been read­ing Twyla Tharp’s book, ‘The Cre­ative Habit.’ I bought it a few months ago in the Kin­dle for­mat so that I could test read­ing books on my iPod Touch. I have come to some con­clu­sions, espe­cially about read­ing on the iPod Touch, but those are for another blog post. Twyla Tharp is an Amer­i­can Dancer and Chore­o­g­ra­pher who has won both Emmy’s and Tony’s for her work. Her book explores the cre­ative process.

Twyla’s book is very inter­est­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. I began read­ing it and was really get­ting into it when she posed a series of ques­tions to the reader. The first of which I didn’t have an answer to. She asked “What is your best idea ever?“

This caused me a lot of trou­ble to find an answer. Was it some pro­gram­ming idea I had? Was it cre­at­ing Man­a­Na­tion? Is it one of the many busi­ness ideas I’ve had and not pur­sued? Was it some­thing else? I just didn’t know. So I stopped read­ing the book for a while to fig­ure out the answer. In truth it was pretty shock­ing to real­ize I didn’t know what I thought of as my great­est idea. As I tried to find an answer, the first epiphany was that I did not know what to use as a meter of suc­cess. Was it the effect? The poten­tial great­ness? The best response from my friends? I hadn’t decided.

photo credit: dia­per

How about you, do you guys know what your best idea is? I’d guess not for most of you. That’s okay, let’s take this jour­ney together.

To me, suc­cess is deter­mined by the mag­ni­tude of the result. Thus any of my unex­plored or un-pursued idea can­not be the great­est idea I’ve ever had because there is no result to measure.

Man­a­Na­tion is a great show and it has helped thou­sands of Magic the Gath­er­ing play­ers improve their game (just posted episode 75!.) It has opened new doors for me to some of the great minds in the game. It has helped me build friend­ships with new peo­ple. It has earned a small income to cover its costs even. But it hasn’t changed the world.

For work at var­i­ous jobs I’ve had numer­ous ideas on how to solve prob­lems or how to improve var­i­ous things but none have been mil­lion dol­lar ideas. At my last job we were try­ing to play with viral con­tent and I came up with the idea of doing a Fire­fox spoof site called FirefoxAddiction.com and we pulled in tens of thou­sands of hits (with 971 diggs as well, enough to make the front­page) when it launched but was still con­sid­ered a fail­ure as it didn’t meet the boss’ expectations.

Per­haps my great­est idea ever was the act of learn­ing HTML which opened up the avenue to my cur­rent employ­ment and so many other oppor­tu­ni­ties. It hasn’t made a dif­fer­ence in the world yet, but with it the above items wouldn’t be listed. If I hadn’t wanted to do web devel­op­ment I would have prob­a­bly gone to col­lege to study lin­guis­tics and lan­guages. My life would be com­pletely different.

Yes. I think that is it. But it eluded me for so long because it wasn’t earth shat­ter­ing. It wasn’t the glam­orous idea. It hasn’t made me my riches (yet). And it hope­fully won’t be the best idea I ever have in my life.

What about you guys, what is your best idea?