Note: For some reason, starting essays or blog posts with sentences such as “this is indeed an interesting topic” is considered amateurish. However, I like doing it because it puts me in a conversational mindset, and I rather communicate to others (regardless of being through voice, video, or text) in a casual manner. In this post, I am just going to start with this long unnecessary paragraph in order to achieve the same result. I accept suggestions on other ways to be explicitly informal.

At a Business Today International Conference, I had the pleasure to hear many distinguished keynote speakers. I honestly can’t remember any of the speeches, but there was one that I always think about and quote to other people. The speaker was the CEO of a middle-man-fuel-trading type company—I don’t recall his name. He stood up in the podium and said something like the following:

you guys are young, you have a lot of time and your minds have not yet been polluted by society. You guys should spent much of this time figuring out what your world views are: Do you believe in God? Why? Would you get an abortion? Why? Do you feel you owe to your country? Your family? Why? Don’t just follow a belief just because the people around you follow it. Allow yourself the opportunity to explore ideas and find which world views best match you—a unique individual […]

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Let’s first start by defining the concept of ‘idea’. Yes, I know this is an amateur way of starting a blog post. But today I am not going to quote Wikipedia or a dictionary definition. Today, I am going to make the definition up (feel free to refute it in the comments). To me, an idea is a type of epiphany that occurs while one is struck with a problem. This epiphany presents a solution to such problem and from the beholder’s perspective, it is very clear that this is the perfect solution.

Powerful ideas have an intuitive name and can be explained to most people in 60 seconds. But contrary to popular belief, I think that a good idea will only be fully appreciated by the epiphaneer. As a matter of fact, I don’t think ideas are worth anything without people with the knowledge, the commitment, and the perseverance to make them happen—this is my assumption. From this, we can derive the following question: If ideas are worthless, then why should anybody see any value in them?

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