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Comment by bigd | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree with this:

     "First and foremost, an idea is never world-changing. It's the execution of the idea that changes things. Until it has been executed successfully and actually changed the world, all it is is an idea. The impact can only be assessed later."

Frankly, I believe ideas can be quite impactful. Think of any math concept. Weren't they ideas? Where's the execution? Or more philosophical terms, such as panta rei, "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.", "communism" etc, aren't those ideas?

My point is that I think boundaries are not as defined. Unless we spend some time defining "idea".

but on the general "stop whining, start doing" underlying message I do agree 100%.

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I very nearly added a caveat about ideas in philosophy, politics, etc. The reason I didn't is because, really, those ideas don't actually change the world. People acting on them is how the world changes. In maths the discovery of something leads people to work on further discoveries - standing on the shoulders of giants as it were - so again it's the work that changes things. Ideas can definitely be a catalyst, but of themselves all that can be said is that they motivate people to change the world rather than change the world themselves.

Although, all that said, I've not given it a huge amount of thought. I could be wrong.

And even in math, its not as if the idea is all there is, and then boom, done. New math concepts take a significant amount of work as well, and the execution can be a significant factor as to whether the idea lays in obscurity, or is picked up and used by the wider body of the math community. There have been plenty of groundbreaking math concepts that were thought of, but nobody followed through to see whether they worked, what the implication were, or how they could be applied.

The execution of a math idea comes in proving things about it and convincing others that the idea is important. Both tasks take real, hard work.

All of those ideas (philosophy, math, political systems) required rigorous effort to formalize and reach a broad audience.

Feel free to disagree, but think of it this way: ideas are possibilities. Until they are attempted, sometimes repeatedly, they are in-flux.

It's the same as the concept of "desire" vs. "intention" vs. "goal" vs. "reality". Ideas without work put into their execution are still in the "intention" phase. Yes, they are boundless, but practically aren't worth anything until they are actualized... that takes a lot of hard work.

The proof would be the execution. Einstein (and those testing his theories) had to perform a lot of work before his ideas were accepted.

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