so many ideas
Ideas are very inconvenient in that they are not real.
My personal tagline on LinkedIn used to be “ideas professional.” I’ve always taken a lot of pride in my ideas. I have good ones. I once thought that they were of great value. So I branded myself accordingly. Since ideas are not really real, I suppose I wasn’t.
Athena was said to have sprung, fully-grown, from the mind of Zeus. This is the part of the story that everyone knows from high school. The full story, according to Hesiod, is not so simple. Athena was the love child of Zeus and Métis, the goddess of wisdom and deep thought. Zeus was concerned that Métis would give birth to a powerful male god that would someday overthrow him. The obvious solution was to swallow Métis. Quick review: Zeus loved wisdom and deep thought, and then swallowed her.
The problem is that Métis was already pregnant. Over time, Zeus developed a, um, really bad migraine. So bad, that he had to call up some friends (Prometheus, Hephaestus, Hermes, or Palaemon) to see if they had advil. They didn’t, so he went with the next obvious solution. TO SPLIT HIS HEAD OPEN WITH AN AXE. From it popped Athena, ready to go to war.
The moral of the story is that even the most well-conceived, perfect ideas are never brought to reality easily. They take a lot of wisdom, deep thought, indigestion, headaches, and the occasional BLOW TO THE HEAD WITH AN AXE.
It has been a while since my last tumblr post. Some of you may have noticed that my Twitter updates have become increasingly sporadic as well. It isn’t for lack of ideas — I have plenty of them causing me migraines. Rather, it has been the effort in bringing some of them into reality that has been keeping me.
I can’t complain. I am finding a new sense of pride in accomplishment, rather than ideas. The hard work may be painful, but take a look at Zeus: to have ideas is human, but to realize them is godly.
