Let’s talk about ideas. How often do you have a really good one? How many of your ideas do you take action on? How do you decide which ones are worth it?

Well, here I go again. Listening to the radio behind the wheel and noticing something I hadn’t thought of before. These two guys on one of the public radio weekend shows was talking about ideas. The premise being that we may, in fact, as a society, be running out of them.

What? Preposterous! As anyone with an over-active imagination, like mine, can tell you, the idea is preposterous on its face. And yet, on some level, the argument that these number crunchers were making made sense.

They were looking at it in terms of comparing the amount of research and development in relation to the amount of progress in any given field. Apparently the amount of energy put in to developing new ideas has been going up, while the forward progress on many fronts is growing slower all the time.

Which would mean that ideas are subject to the same laws of diminishing returns that concrete things in the real world are.

Just to be clear, as an aside, ideas probably have the most potential leverage of any force in the universe. From the most invisible and weightless spark of consciousness imaginable springs fourth civilizations, cultures, or the wheel. You’ve probably had that experience where some thing hits the market and you think “Ha! I thought of that along time ago!” For whatever reason, you weren’t the right one at the right time to act upon it.

I remember riding my bicycle in the 70s and wishing there was someway to carry along music in my headphones. A year or two later the first Sony WalkMan came out.

The thing that struck me about the point they were making was how similar it is to the underlying concept behind something I’m sure you’ve heard about lately. There’s no escaping all of the noise around Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and NFTs.

The whole idea of Bitcoin is that there are only ever going to be a certain number of these ineffable digital constructs, and that the less there are left, the harder it is to ‘mine’ them. ‘Mining them’ means having computers that solve specific math problems, gobbling up insane amounts of energy and heating up the planet in the process.

Aside from the fact that cryptocurrency is terrible for the environment, basically useless as a means-of-exchange, and a threat to democracy, you have a huge swath of the creative community around the world sold on the idea that somehow by making ‘Non-Fungible-Tokens’ (NFTs) out of some digital doodles will somehow lead to success. (Wanna learn more? Watch this.) I liked it better when artists were busy making creative statements that had some sort of positive impact on culture.

Remember, not all ideas are good ones! Or rather, should I say, an idea that may be good for one person or group, might be very bad for everyone else who falls for it. If he was still alive, you could ask Charles Ponzi about that!

Well, crypto may be a flash in the pan, but the idea that ideas are in short supply seems impossible. I prefer to think that in the very moment I’m writing this, some genius somewhere is having the aha moment that will change the world for the better in ways we can’t even imagine.

Only you know how to apply the ideas that bubble up in your own brain to your own life or the world at large. So prime the pump and keep them coming, a spark from your soul is  just asking to manifest here in the material plane!

Much love and inspiration till next week!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine