rocknbil - 7:21 pm on Mar 4, 2010 (gmt 0)

I'm going to offer up something I shouldn't. :-) I am not an "idea person." I am an "enabler" (but not in the psycho babble description of the word.) People come to me with ideas, I make them happen. But when I come up with an idea, it either sucks when I thought it didn't, or it just doesn't happen. The ones I help seem to be very successful.

I'll give you one example, I worked at an ISP as "webmaster" (in spite of how much I detest the term) and there was a guy in tech support, answering phones for minimum wage, who I became friends with. This guy was a genius IMO, tech savvy . . . and had this idea. I won't reveal the idea, but it had to do with something everyone wants.

He puts up this web site with manuals for equipment related to this idea. I always rag him about how his site sucks, invalid doctype, tables for layout, just about everything technically wrong you could think of. But he kept hammering out manuals.

A year later . . . the man is a millionaire and five years later there is no change in his income, even in this economy. His money was made with adSense, but it wasn't a spectacular site, it wasn't breaking technology like Facebook, it is just a free content site with thousands and thousands of manuals, and as the technology changes, he adds more. Without getting into details, he is having discussions with Google and Microsoft, not generic emails . . . phone conversations.

The moral of this anecdote is that some of us are just not idea people. I'm one of them. But what I do enables many people to lead prosperous lives, and that is good enough for me, it is my "place." So you just need to find out what your place is.