Ideas from far away lands

I had a great Skype call with my very good friend Taylor Baldry this morning. He has been living in Japan now for a year and half teaching English. The time difference thing really works in our favor in terms of catching each other on the old Skype. 

Taylor has an idea for a project and I am not sure how top secret it is so I'll mention it in a vague sort of way. For years now Taylor has been carrying around a notebook where he's been keeping a record of his brilliant ideas. Yes, I say brilliant and that's the honest truth! I've known Taylor since our time at MCAD and he's been pretty reliable in the old ideas department and he's one of my favourite people to work with.

Anyways, so Taylor has been filling this notebook of his with lots of ideas. The only problem is that Taylor is just one man. He couldn't possibly actualize all of them in his lifetime, unless someone gave him a lot of money to just create his ideas. Which by the way is one of the ideas in the book.

So Taylor thought what if he made the ideas public and let other people take them and bring them to life. I think it's a cool idea and am interested to see it develop.

While Taylor and I were talking about it he was wondering how it was actually going to work. Would people work in teams globally? Would they upload project plans to the website and people could comment on them? Would they send in their completed projects to him? What would be the benefit for people to take part in this project? Just basically how the thing is going to work.

Now, this is what I love about the digital age we live in. I suggested to Taylor that he could do a couple of test ideas on the site to see how the process worked before he launched it for real.

I guess if you're not sure how something should work the best way forward is to just try something and see how it goes. Through the process of actually doing it he'd be able to see what worked and what didn't and then refine his idea. It would the testing phase. 

I think sometimes, myself included in this, that people have ideas and they want to create something, but they think they have to know exactly how it's going to work before doing it. When actually things change all the time.There are of course a million ways to go about things, but the point is that you have to start somewhere.

One of my favourite quotes is from John Cage who tells us to Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

In this digital age we can revise things, adjust things, delete things, improve things, move things around, improve the user journey, make things look better, improve the copy and so on and so on. You get the picture.

I am excited to be involved in Taylor's project and to see what happens. I will keep you posted and share the link once it's gone live.