Realized after publishing the other post about infinite Tetris that I drafted this one in December and never posted it… same idea, different angle. And obviously since I didn’t post this, I also don’t delete the infinite Tetris note, and then had basically the same stream of consciousness 5 months later…
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I've been trying to keep my personal notes better organized and one thing that always strikes me is my tendency to write down ideas then never act on them. It's like the act of having a backlog of possible projects is soothing to me somehow. As if I'm going to go back, prioritize them, evaluate them based on some objective method, then choose the one that's the most reasonable and logical side project.
What I've found to be true is that I am most likely to leave it in a notebook somewhere and never come back to it.
The idea that's on my mind at the moment is "infinite tetris" which I wrote down at least 18 months ago, probably after playing bejeweled zen mode for a while.
As a kid, I had a relative that would always point to some invention and say "my friend and I had this idea 5 years ago, if only we'd have done it, we'd be rich now" (the instance i'm thinking about a the moment is pay per minute internet kiosks). Something about the fear of a missed opportunity to "get rich" maybe still haunts me.
I think, I should write this down and come back to it, as if I can capitalize on every single thought I've ever had. Like I'll go back and refine them all over time, gradually building up a library of skills that will allow me to be entirely self sufficient and wealthy somehow. You know, this classic plan that always works:
- idea
- something happens
- success
But every once in a while a wave of clarity comes over me, I'm honest with myself, I have an epiphany that I will never do this project. There are many unknowns in step 2 of my plan. So I should just let it die. But the fear of unrealized potential will nag at the back of my mind. So lately, it crossed my mind that I could intentionally let these thoughts go by publishing them. This would accomplish 2 things:
- The idea is permanently stored... as permanent as this blog is at least...
- There is a chance that the idea gets done by someone else.
- I feel like I got something from it... either simply the chance to write, or the chance to tell myself that if I see it implemented, I have some documentation that "I had it first"...
Coming to the close of this thought, I feel like Phil in Modern Family where he shows Gloria a video of his song "Snappy" that predates Pharell's "Happy" by 2 years...