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The Limited Value Of Ideas
There is a line of thinking that says that the world is built on ideas. It was an idea that launched the American Revolution and created a nation. It was an idea that led Albert Einstein to pursue relativity, Linus Pauling to invent a vaccine and for Steve Jobs to create the iPhone and build the most valuable company in the world.
It is because of the power of ideas that we hold them so dear. We want to protect those we believe are valuable and sometimes become jealous when others think them up first. There’s nothing so rapturous as the moment of epiphany in which an idea forms in our mind and begins to take shape.
Clearly, ideas are important, but not as many believe. America is what it is today, for better or worse, not just because of the principles of its founding, but because of the actions that came after it. We revere people like Einstein, Pauling and Jobs not because of their ideas, but what they did with them. The truth is that although possibilities are infinite, ideas are limited.
The Winklevoss Affair
The muddled story of Facebook’s origin is now well known. Mark Zuckerberg met with the Winklevoss twins and another Harvard classmate to discuss building a social network together. Zuckerberg agreed, but then sandbagged his partners while he built and launched a competing site. He would later pay…
