Development

Worried About Your Idea Being Stolen?

Garth Beyer

A lot of people don’t follow through with an idea because they think others will just rip it off, essentially stealing it.

Aside from the fact that their idea was likely stolen from some other artist anyway, I’ve decided to write today with the intention of putting this worry of theft to rest.

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A great idea never just happens. A great idea is a good idea actually executed, created, put to the test. Great ideas require a deep investment; both time and emotion. The myth is that great ideas are worth hanging on to.

They’re not.

If the market sees a great idea become a successful idea, then the market will naturally spit out artists that will attempt to mimic your great idea. Twitter became a success, and then dozens of other apps that run just like Twitter were developed.

Do you believe the founders of Twitter are still there running it? Think again.

They are off creating something else while the market is wasting its time and energy on replicating (stealing the idea) of a successful business to earn small profits off the laggards.

If you have a good idea, implement it and turn it into a great one without the worry of it being stolen because if it’s a great idea, it will.

And that goes to your advantage because you’re off developing the next great idea while everyone is trying to steal your first idea.

Having your idea stolen just means that you’re in the lead.

 

Stay Positive & Keep Creating

Garth E. Beyer

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Constitutive Choices

Garth Beyer

With the founding of the Republic, sets of conditions for its future had to be developed. Paul Starr refers to these conditions as “constitutive choices.”

The first of which that was made is what we have simply come to know as the First Amendment, or freedom of speech. However, the constitutive choice Starr mentions is much larger than that as it directly affects the development of newspapers and by extension the postal service. The old ideas of who should and could know what have been thrown out. Now a sovereign land, people needed to know how their state was running, what was occurring in far off areas, and they needed to have a solid way to communicate with each other – quickly.

Starr refers to this transition as “America’s First Information Revolution.” With the support of the Government for the first 40 years, the postal service helped build a knowledge economy. Since postage was cheap, newspapers were cheap, and most other factors of the press were cheap, information was able to be delivered all throughout the states. The expansion of the Post Office closed the information gap between communities and outsiders (country folk). As a result, the public and political lives of the people were able to closely interact with each other. In other words, the mass had access to information and used it.

In addition, the advance in the postal system and the expansion of newspapers helped create a modern census and played a large role in the rise of common schools. With the rise of common schools, literacy would rise and the cycle would be pushed even more. The constitutive choice to build an open source foundation for the Republic lead directly to its next constitutive choice: the creation and establishment of networks.

The invention of the telegraph gave rise to modern technological networks which in turn speed up the connections that now not only people have with each other as a mass, but that states have with their armies, that towns have with their sister merchant communities, that government has with itself and that newspapers have with each other.

However, at a play against the first constitutive choice, the telegraph evolved into a means of centralized control of information. While chiefly used for business, the telegraph service was also the first national monopoly. The reason behind the controlling path that the telegraph grew into is that it began growing without any government regulation. The telegraph was established as a private enterprise and as a result went through a series of competitions: who would control the networks? How would they control it? Luckily these answers were already provided pre-telegraph.

The interesting aspect of the constitutive choices that Starr discusses is that they are cumulative. The telegraph was simply a new technology to place at the front of processes of communication and information that were already developed and established. All in all, the decision to develop the telegraph privately gave America the challenge it needed to strengthen and affirm their constitutive foundations but it also represented America’s choice for future technological advancements. The telegraph was America’s fork in the road, their initial setting of networking structures, and their decision to privatize it was a precedent to broadcasting.

The third constitutive movement Starr discusses is the development of institutions that resulted in real, human, intangible progress. Previously I had mentioned the expansion of public schools with the rise of the Post Office and newspapers. From there, the technological networks that were implemented furthered the expansion of education. From the beginning, it was decided that knowledge, education, research, and information would be a priority (a constitutive movement) for America. While this movement continues today, a prime example in history involves the radio. The National Committee on Education by Radio (NCER) proposed that 15 percent of broadcast channels be reserved for government-chartered educational stations. This movement promoted the diffusion of knowledge. By extension, the mass flow of information, knowledge, and ideas laid the groundwork for further explorations, developments, and innovations. It needs reiteration that the constitutive choices that were made were cumulative and that there is no going back once the choice was made, which only further signifies Americans transformation through communication.

A Writer Needs To Be Wrong

Garth Beyer

I want to be wrong.

 

So often writers and people in general second guess everything, especially what they write. They then cross it out, erase it, work around it or completely rewrite it. After you do this for so long, you eventually just handle the process in your head without realizing it. You begin to think of every word, sentence, and part of grammar before you write it.

–R.I.P Paragraph that I wrote and erased–

Now it may be safe, but it’s not healthy for a writer to do so. It disconnects you from a flow of writing which is much more important than the flow of thinking. – In which case that would make you a philosopher, not a writer –

Moreover, you would surely agree that writers learn from their mistakes and though they may still make them in their minds, they are not acknowledging them, learning from them or are able to look back at them and see where the mind strayed off track.

The ability to not only learn from mistakes, but actually play with them, develop with them and write with them allows the writer to explore purity. I say purity because everything that you have ignored, every angle you avoided writing from, every idea that you felt went off the story line has never been touched or tampered with and so it remains pure.

After you write for some time, you will learn that what most people want to read is pure writing and to find pure writing, you have to do the manual labor of writing on ideas that you would normally and subconsciously cross out or erase.

I always say, if hair on your chest makes you a man, scribbles and crossed out words makes you a writer.

 

Stay Positive & Purity In Writing Is Unlimited

Garth E. Beyer

Making Old Jobs New

Garth Beyer

The unemployment rate is despicable. It’s not because more jobs aren’t being created, they are. It’s the fact that the new jobs are replicating the ones that have always been used.

If we want the unemployment rate to go down, if we want to do real, honest and passionate work, if we want to look forward to work (something that is necessary to want the unemployment rate down), then we need to make old jobs new, not make new old jobs.

Currently, a worker’s pay is based on compensation, of the hours put into work. What it needs to be based off of is creativity deliberation, not compensation. Simple terms: paid to go in and make a ruckus.

Through that ruckus, we see improvement, new development, a fresh way of thinking, creativity and above all, results that mean something, not just numbers on a financial statement.

That doesn’t mean you need a new job, a better job or a second job, it has nothing to do with making more jobs, it’s about transforming new ones out of the old ones. It’s about doing the ones we do now differently, creatively and passionately.

We’re all self-employed even if we have a job, that’s a given, but to leave it at just “self-employed” doesn’t do any good, it doesn’t call for an action, a direction to take. We’re all “self-employed artists“, capable to be original in our thought processes straight to the core of what we create in our jobs.

Through our artistry, we can change, improve and develop our jobs into something magnificent. Something worth waking up for each day. It is through this that we can discover new ways to do the job better, more efficiently, uniquely and to serve and benefit people even more.

Most importantly, this is the way we can end the idea of an unemployment rate.

 

Stay Positive & These Are The Jobs We Want In The USA

Garth E. Beyer