Ashfaq Ishaq Shares Thoughts on Ideas and Idea Generation

• Clips (1)
• Interviews/Lectures (1)
• Company Info (1)
• Speaker Bio (1)
• Themes (2)
• Podcasts (0)

Transcript

Ishaq27_ideasAreDivine1

I think we as human beings, I mean, when we need social reinforcement is always when we are doing something new. If I put on a new tie, I like to say, Do you like it? If a child puts on a new t-shirt and goes, How is this? So, it is the same thing with an idea. When a child gets an idea, that's the time when she or he needs either an affirmation whether their idea is good or not. The problem is--this is, for example, a problem at ICAF that we face so many times. I am sure that entrepreneurs and businesses also face is how do you continue to inspire a colleague or a worker or an employee or a child to generate new ideas when the recent idea you don't like and it is rubbish. Because you want to tell them this idea is not good, but, oh, go and produce more ideas. It is okay sometimes to come up with ideas that are bad. So, I think when a child is told that ideas are divine, that is all you need to tell a child, so then the child will say, Hey, yes. Maybe there is one idea that is not relevant now or it does not fit in now. Either somebody already thought of an idea or the time is not right for this idea. You know, whenever an idea comes to me, I should remember it. I think so many of us in this world they have forgotten all of these great solutions that they came up with problems, and they never even recorded them. The other thing is we have not really taken into account the ideas of so many other people from around the world to the problems that even we face, because we have never been connected. The problem in human progress has also been that it has been concentrated in some parts of the world at any one given time, so that even only the ideas of the leaders of that particular moment in civilization are the ideas that can be aired, and the ideas elsewhere are ignored. You know, with 6 billion people in this world if all of them were coming up with good ideas, I assure you there are a lot of problems that we can solve. Maybe that is what the next evolution of the Internet is that it will become the idea and that creativity platform. Coming back to when Alexander the Great came up with the idea to conquer Persia, which his like somebody from Guatemala coming up with the idea of invading the U.S. That is the big difference. Even to Aristotle, and Aristotle said, Ideas are divine, meaning that you can do it. So, thereby this young boy he went and he conquered what he thought was the world from this little tiny little place, and going and conquering the--he was so small that the Persians didn't even take him seriously. That was how they got defeated, because they never took him seriously enough. They thought it would be another Polo match of sorts.