Comic Commentary Week: 2

click to see all of it*

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity... There is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:2b, 9b)

I know I've felt this way.  I have some ideas but...well, it seems like all the ideas are taken.  I started writing songs years ago and every song would sound like another song and I'd get frustrated.  I would complain to Lori, "There's only so many ways you can put the chords together.  There's only so many notes in the scale. It's all been done before."  But I know it's not true.  I listen to Needtobreathe and David Crowder and U2 and hear lots of different ways of putting those same notes and chords together...  And there's a handful of classical pieces that I like (but most of them all sound the same to me, and I can't understand the words to opera - does that mean I'm too young?) and they are, again, using the same notes and the same chords...

Creative people have ideas.  It's that simple.  Ideas are everywhere.  Ideas are free** and they are easy to come by.  The challenge is sifting the ideas - it's knowing which are good ideas, which are the right ideas to act on.  So, Dilbert has an app idea that 10 other people have had.***  Can you do a variation that is 10 times better than any of those?  If ten people have already created that app, there's probably a void somewhere else - look at what people aren't doing that you wish they were.

Of course what's missing from today's panel is the one that came before it - lemme go grab it:

click to see all of it*

If the goal of finding an app to create is to make a million, you are probably doing it for the wrong reason.  Not to say that lots of people aren't doing just that, but the better projects are done, I submit, out of passion - because it's something I want to see in the world.  So if you spend four months creating it - and you are the only person in the world who wants it and uses it - you are still just as satisfied.

Ideas aren't the problem.  What we want to do with those ideas becomes the problem.  Legend has it that when J.R.R. Tolkien first wrote The Hobbit and sent it to a publisher, who gave it to his ten year old son to review.  But Tolkien wrote what he wrote - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and most importantly what became The Silmarillion because they were stories he wanted to read.  It becomes painfully obvious when an author, filmmaker, musician - frankly anybody - is doing a work they are passionate about or just cashing a paycheck.

Yeah, everything's been done.  Sort of.  Then there was a telephone.  But letters work just fine.  Then there was a cell phone.  But landlines work just fine.  Then there was...

Ideas are everywhere.

*I didn't save the date - copyright Scott Adams, no infringement intended


**I've blogged about this before


]***And, of course, this doesn't just have to do with apps.  Put the thing you're creatively stuck in place here.  Writer's block.  Dry spells.  Whatever.