When I came to college I was full of excitement for life and an eagerness to learn. I honestly thought that I knew a lot about life and would be able to contribute a lot to the world, even back then.  I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about everything I encountered, coming to all sorts of conclusions that I thought were new and exciting. But then reality started in.  Over the next few years the same thing kept happening: every cool idea I thought I had “come up with” was already “like so and so” and “oh, that sounds like X.”   

Quickly I developed the impression that everything I would ever think had already been thought.

This happened again today. I was going through some blogs and I came across an excellent entry on Lateral Action on “The Rise of the Creative Economy.” I plan on writing an entry on this still, but I found it somewhat frustrating.  I was really hoping that idea wasn’t already taken. Silly me.  Of course people have noticed that trend.  

Honestly, being young in this world sucks sometimes. In the eagerness of youth your mind races through ideas a hundred miles a second…only to find that most of them aren’t original at all. After all, how does a 21 year old know enough about the world to know what is new and what isn’t? And when you finally know what is out there you run the risk of being locked into the ideas you were trying to usurp.  Forget the phrase “youth is wasted on the young.”  Youth is wasted on the ignorant is by far more accurate. 

But it goes beyond this. In a world full of billions of people how does one voice hope to make a difference? In the same way that currency dilutes with the increase of availability, so do opinions and ideas.   From the view of a young twenty-something is seems incredibly intimidating to embark on a blogging enterprise that attempts to catelog the world’s problems when I know so very little in comparison to the wealth of knowledge that is out there. What is my two cents to the trillions of dollars being tossed around?

Yet at the same time it is a relatively well-known trait of the business world that it is the twenty-somethings who possess the open minds to come in an reshape things in exciting new ways.  Might ideas and opinions work the same way? After all, despite the numerous “oh that sounds like X” I think I do have potential to contribute new and exciting ideas. The problem is, there is so much to learn about what is already out there to know where I can actually contribute. This is part of the reason that specialization is such a big deal today, particularly in academia.  Trying to do something like what we’re doing here, well that’s just ludicrous. 

Maybe. Or maybe that’s why it will work. Regardless, I will repeat the same thing I’ve been saying my whole life: man, I’ve got a lot to learn. Perhaps with time and a lot of hard work my two cents will finally be worth something.