"Good ideas have lonely childhoods" | Hacker News Reader

"Good ideas have lonely childhoods"

gapingvoid.com

48 pointsMaysonL14 comments

I agree with most of the points presented, but I just cannot agree with point 2. In fact, the second point comes across as more like hey-you're-awesome mumbo jumbo that I would expect from motivational speakers.

"Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted"

I don't think a blanket statement like they are always resisted is quite true. For example, a simple test would be:

2 people are caught in a house fire, person A says "lets get out of here"... person B would have to say "no, lets stay here" for this statement to be true.

Similarly ideas can be resisted because they are actually bad ideas.

If anything, I would say that people are more or less resistant to change, unless there are very obvious reasons for change.

It seems like you're over analyzing the point he was trying to make. I've seen his point to be true in the corporate environment time and time again. The problem with the standard org chart is that there is one person who is identified as "boss" and with that comes the implication that he generally knows best. If someone else has a different or contrarian idea it kind of goes against the established power structure and has a potential to cause problems.

I'm not saying that it's not true a lot of the time as I do believe a lot of good ideas do meet initial resistance, by all means I think that people should be as creative as they can.

I just think that the one thing that we are all looking for is validation (especially in an idea rich environment such as this) and that such a blanket statement as "all good ideas are initially resisted" can be misleading, especially if someone misinterprets it as "my idea is being resisted, therefore it must be a good idea"...

As Iggy Pop once sang (please excuse the language, but it is probably appropriate)

if it looks like shit, sounds like shit, it must be shit

But in all seriousness, I wasn't meant to overanalyze the point, I was just trying to provide commentary on why I don't think it is as black and white as was laid out in the post and it only applied to that single point.

Thanks for motivating me to explain it a little better, +1 for you!

conversely, do lonely children have good ideas?

Playing along with your question, I suggest no more so than popular children, however the popular children are exposed to pressure to discard the good ideas and have no incentive for acting on them.

Those few lonely children with good ideas, OTOH, have very little pressuring them to abandon their ideas. Who asking them to stop coding and go out to play?

interesting. I've noticed some famously creative people had a period of convalescence during their childhood. e.g. Descartes apparently formulated the idea of x-y (ie Cartesian) coordinates while bed-ridden.

I don't know how strong the correlation is (maybe lots of bedridden kids don't become creative? maybe lots of non-bedridden kids do become creative?), and there are other reasons for being lonely.

Well, if you're lonlely, bedridden or have any kind of impediments to living the "conventional" life, then I'd presume that solitary (and somewhat sedentary) fields like science and arts would be your outlet for creativity.

On the other hand, I have a friend who you wouldn't call creative in the conventional sense, but comes up with increasingly imaginative ways to pull women. Ultimately, it's what you devote your time to, whether it's by free will or some limitation.

I used to be asked by my family, etc to go out and play... only that I didn't care much or found it quite boring. I'm sure mine's not the only case.

I used to as well. Instead I'd stay in and play Starcraft. I wonder if that's what helped lead to my ideas (good and bad).

Being popular generally requires being a good practitioner of convention. Good ideas almost by definition are never part of convention but rather define future convention. Therefore if one is popular and thus is consumed by convention, in most cases he/she won't be a source of good ideas.

* This tho probably only applies to good ideas as in paradigm shifting game changers. If you include minor evolutions of existing ideas (that can be quite successful financially of course), being popular might even help to come up with those.

"The hard bit of having a "good idea" is not the invention of it, nor the selling of it to the end-user, but managing the myriad of politics and egos of the people who are supposedly on the same team as yourself."

Does this statement disturb you all like it frightens me?

I wonder if its just the case that most of ideas are created by the "nerds" and the "geeks" who had lonenly childhoods because of their smarts and got picked on in school.

I really don't think you can create anything decent if you don't surround yourself by other smart people that'll make you think.

I also think that many good people have lonely childhoods.

Though not many lonely people have good childhoods.

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