Beginning @ Nothing

There is this one moment when an idea is created. Almost magically thoughts that may gravitate around a problem finds enough relevant experiences, pictures and emotions at one point in time and presents an “idea” that contains a possible solution. It’s a chemical process inside our brain, and actually has no connection to the real world. At this very moment there is nothing that represents the idea in the real world. It’s just a spark of energy in our scull.

The next key event is the actual birth of the idea. It’s the process when the idea is brought to the world, communicated with our language and pictures we may draw to share the idea with other people. Those other people may augment the idea with a different perspective and the more people we talk to the more versions and perspectives we get.

When we now nurture the idea, we do that by modeling the possible outcome, we try to understand its necessity, impact, evolution, permutation, and what it may take to make it a reality. The more intelligent a person is the more he or she is nurturing the idea by modeling what it is all about, BEFORE they actually build a prototype. The more inputs and the more modeling, the more likely it is that we build the right solution. In the future we may want and soon need an AI system in order to make not just some handful of models but play with an idea a million times – million iterations. Still the idea is still an idea.

When we craft the first prototype, hire people to explore the market and later sell to that market, help finding capital, we work our way through something that literally matures – physically – out of nothing but a chemical spark in the darkness of our brain.

The way we come up with new ideas has not changed. We created simple things like a table, and complex things like computers, self driving cars, space rockets, Windows, doors, skyscraper and literally everything that is not automatically created by nature.

What has changed though is the speed in which we transform those brain sparks into real products and bring them to market. And the more ideas become a reality, the more we get inspired to build on top of those ideas or branch out into new ideas or fields of applications.

All human created products have been brought to live and into markets through a very small number of people. Roughly 0.007% of humans, called entrepreneurs, are the ones who take dreams and make it a reality. Whether they are the inventor or idea creator or not.

The process of bringing those ideas to live is the base of this book: Beginning at Nothing