Ideas

Amazon recently bought Twitch for a billion dollars. If you are wondering what Twitch is, let Peter Kafka and Eric Johnson explain:

“For the uninitiated, Twitch is a platform for making and talking about videos of videogame play. About a million users a month record themselves playing videogames, while the rest — pegged at 50 million unique viewers in July — watch and comment on the videos.”

If that sounds insane to you, consider what John Gruber has to say:

“The future of TV is online streaming, not traditional “channels” that come through cable or satellite…My son and his friends watch far more YouTube content than they do traditional TV. Cable TV is dying.”

Seth Godin commented on how he had a similar idea way back in 1989! Of course, back then, it meant making “videotapes of people playing video games”, not online streaming. Godin though isn’t bitter:

“No, the hard part isn't merely thinking of an idea…The truly hard part is, 25 years later, sticking with it long enough for it to actually work.”

I guess Idea Cellular's byline (“An idea can change your life”) should have the “if you stick to it” clause added to it!

But knowing when to drop an idea is equally important. But that can be very tough. Leonardo di Caprio conveys that point superbly in the movie Inception:

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Victor Hugo famously said:

“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

But is that really true? Or is it just an after-the-event feeling that something was inevitable all along? Doesn’t Leon Wieseltier’s point sound more believable:

“The historical victory of an idea reveals nothing about its merit: power has uses for fictions.”

Besides, how often does a new idea get accepted easily? As Howard Aiken said:

“Don't worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you're ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”

Max Planck was even more skeptical (and he was talking about new scientific truths, not ideas!):

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Methinks Victor Hugo didn’t know the first thing about ideas.