When Ideas Have Sex

By Tommy Leung on 06/30/2010 in Life, Marketing

The fastest way to come up with new ideas is to let ideas have sex. Whether the conceived ideas are good or bad is of little importance. Bad ideas will die a premature death. Only the good ideas will survive.

No great ideas came about by themselves. Individuals are credited with being the first to invent or discover something but, that ignores all the work that had gone before to make it possible for this one individual to get there.

It is impossible for the first man to invent a pencil on his own no matter how smart he was. Firstly, he wouldn’t have any time left to invent after he’s done hunting and gathering. The sole effort of getting enough to eat takes up most of the daylight hours. The rest of the time is used to ensure that wild animals don’t kill him at night.

The only way for him to get time to do things other than find food and have a safe shelter is to cooperate with another person. One person finds food and the other builds a shelter. At the end of the day, both have food and shelter in half the time it would have otherwise took them to do it alone.

This is no new revelation. Economists call this comparative advantage. You trade one thing for another. In this case, these two primitive humans are trading food for shelter and vice versa. Both are better off.

In fact, there is no other way for humans to prosper.  There is nothing as uniquely human as trade. Trade is why we are the most dominate life form on the planet. It is why other species of upright apes are no longer with us. They didn’t trade. We did.

No other creature on the planet trades like we do. You never see a dog offer another dog a bone for a rope. It is an idea that is inconceivable to them.

Modern society is built on top of the idea of trade. Everything from our computers to our food is made possible by trade–the trade of goods, services, and ideas.

This blog software that I use came about by the contributions and ideas of thousands of people. Most of whom I will never know. The design, the technology, and the architecture has been built over time little by little. Idea by idea.

They are then glued together by a much smaller group of people to create a tool that has enabled millions of people to write about the mundane to the world changing.

This happened because a lot of ideas had a lot of sex.

By Tommy Leung