The human brain, being the curious little thing that it is, tends to constantly look for things that can be broken down, processed, and made to make sense, and when it comes across something that doesn’t make sense, it begins its pursuit to look for the most plausible reason to make it make sense.
If you made it past the piece of gibberish that I have written above, let me elaborate a little further. It is perfectly natural for us to look at an entity and wonder ‘What could possibly be the reason for its existence? Could I improve something about this? Can I derive something from this and create a new entity of my own?’ etc. It is this thought that incites a process that not only tests our creativity but also sees the knowledge that we have accumulated come to life. If continued, this process can lead us to grasp more knowledge which, when done right, can lead to a breakthrough that in itself might be considered as priceless knowledge. We tend to term this process as the process of Ideation.
I personally consider the process of Ideation to be very similar to the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment. As long as we haven’t peeked inside the bunker, the cat is in a pseudo-state i.e. it is both dead and alive. Likewise, as long as you haven’t unleashed an idea that you have, as long as you have suppressed it by confining it to your mind, the idea is both dead and alive. Dead because you haven’t planned on working on it, alive because you haven’t planned on dropping it either. As long as an idea is confined to your mind (and occasionally to the shampoo bottles while you have a nice warm shower), it’s just a figment of your imagination, and you can only hypothesize and theorize as to whether it will lead to something meaningful.
As Sue Grafton once said, “Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.” It is this very process of execution that scares the living daylights out of people. Yes, there is a chance of faltering. Yes, there is a chance of things not working out. The process of Ideation is certainly complex. Sometimes your very first idea might lead you to greatness, while sometimes that status might not be achieved even after spending countless amounts of time on this process. But as long as the execution of these ideas hasn’t even been initiated, you’ll never know if the cat could’ve lived on.
Being the masters of our own will, we choose what we want to believe in. At the end of the day, whether we believe in any of our ideas is completely dependent on our opinion towards them. The process of Ideation and the execution of the ideas derived from it is what has paved the way for the current civilization as we know it, and it is completely upon us to decide if we want to contribute something to this. Suppressing it will eventually lead to stagnancy and end up being the downfall of humankind.
– Sumeet Haldipur (SE Comps)