We get ideas all the time. Many we quickly forget or shelve and most don’t prosper beyond the fleeting thoughts they had been.
Many ideas are originally not ours. Many ideas we notice while interacting with other people. We see some that seems worth the trouble to invest time and resources in such that we tell the people that we want to build from their ideas.
This is how teamwork starts. When we build from someone else’s ideas, we say to that someone that their ideas have value. We send a message that the person we’re interacting with has value.
It’s definitely much better than killing an idea outright, which tragically happens more often than not. Rather than say an idea isn’t good, we ask instead “how can we build something from that idea?” The potential answers can become endless in number as we welcome more thoughts, more ideas.
People have ideas just like we do. And theirs can just be much better than ours. Another way of putting it is that other people have already thought about our ideas before we came up with them.
Many inventors build based on the ideas of others. Many inventions are far from what they were originally thought. Chances are, however, they developed from the tinkering and cultivating of other people’s ideas.
The late Steve Jobs of Apple took a class on calligraphy and it is said that the class inspired him to promote the very many fonts we see on Apple’s and other manufacturers’ computers today:
-Steve Jobs
Note that Jobs said “we designed it all into the Mac;” he and his design team members built on each other’s thoughts to bring the breakthrough of fonts into personal computers.
We all have our ideas and some of us would like to get sole credit for the ones that develop into beneficial inventions. But in more ways than one, inventions are likely the products of teamwork, in which individuals cooperate to share ideas and make them realities. And the device that makes that happen is the building from each other’s thoughts.
Invention is not a one-person job.
Ellery's Essays 