You Are A Genius

Last night I watched American Idol for the first time in my life. I was kind of proud that I was able to avoid it for this long. I wasn't deliberately trying and it oddly wasn't hard, considering the popularity you'd think it would be impossible. Watching it was this weird insight into another world, very strange, uneventful. But one thing struck me. It's Star Search. I know, we all know that. But think about this. Between the British version, the American version, ad sales, syndication, DVD's, web ads, and CD sales, that property has generated untold Billions. Inconceiveable amounts of money. And who makes it? Simon Cowell. He didn't need to produce it, he hasn't needed to step foot on the set or EVEN TALK TO ANYONE INVOLVED with the show after the day he sold the idea to make a shitload of cash off every single episode. All he had to do was get the idea bought once a long time ago and do nothing else.

Paul Haggis, writer for Love Boat and Diff'rent Strokes (about kids so poor they could only afford an apostrophe instead of another "e") got a call one night from a friend. "We're fucked, we've got this pilot for this show called Walker, Texas Ranger, we shoot next week and the pilot is awful, can you help?" Paul spent exactly one week of his life helping the friend out and never wrote another word. He earned a "created by" credit and collected a check for every episode that aired, another check everytime it aired in syndication. One night he woke up in a cold sweat because he had seen his tombstone in a dream: it said "Here lies Paul Haggis, creator of Walker, Texas Ranger. He didn't go back to sleep, he wrote the treatment for Crash that night. His grave will say something diff'rent now.

Google.com, maybe the biggest success story in internet history, their idea? A search engine.
Youtube.com was bought for $30million, their idea? Putting video on a website.
Flickr.com was bought for $40million, their idea? Putting pictures on a website.
Myspace.com was bought for $60million, their idea? Friendster's idea.

Tell me, if you came up with any one of those three ideas, would you not immediatly discard it? Search engine? There's Yahoo, they were the first ones with that idea and the only ones that will ever have it, what a stupid idea I had to create another one. Putting pictures on the web? Can't people already do that? What a stupid idea. Putting movies on the web, well I know everyone already does that, I've seen trailers. Stupid me. Here you and I sit, a sum total of the nuber of times we failed to recognize how much of a genius we both are and Simon Cowell is taking in checks for 100's of thousands of dollars every week because he said a magic phrase: "Whatever happened to Star Search?" Not a big idea. One you or I would most certainly discard.

A big idea not acted upon, is no idea at all. We all have inside of us all the ideas we'll ever need, we're set in that department, but recognizing those ideas as genius, that seems to be the difference between you and me and Simon Cowell and the Google guys.

There is nothing different between those described above and you, they are not special, they do not contain special genetics. But when they get an idea they never say it can't be any good because it came from them. The next time you get an idea, don't move on, pay attention, write it down, run with it, build up your reservoir of self-belief. Go create.

Tomorrow the short haired chicks will flow like wine, and I will be writing Todd Voorhies blog "Let's Go Bronco's" all day tomorrow in liveblog format as he jumps through hoops all day to arrange his gang for a Friday night throwdown, now go create.