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I've never seen a job ad for "idea people". Usually, idea people are made fun of, like Michael Keaton's character in Night Shift (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084412/quotes) - or Scriber, in A Fire Upon the Deep (http://books.google.com.au/books?id=uRjpxtbshBYC&lpg=PT110&o...).

  "[...] It's that, the actual doing, that's going slow."
  Scriber nodded knowingly. That had been the central problem in his life too.
The "big" problem is the space of ideas is huge, expanding exponentially, each variation admitting many more ways of varying. And... the vast majority are no good. So youth's easy enthusiasm for ideas quickly turn to caution, doubt, ridicule, and they become bitter cynics before their time, getting very angry with youth's easy enthusiasms.

The exception is an idea that actually has a verified concrete benefit. A good idea. But here, people don't care about the idea; but they care about the benefit.

A common problem is when the greatest benefits of your wonderful idea are not yet verifiable... the solution is to find (or work to create) some benefit - perhaps much smaller than the dream - that is concrete and verifiable. Then, people will adopt it. Ideally, as time goes on, you can add more and more benefits which comprise the dream til it is complete (or at least give you time to work on making real your dream's benefits.)




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