For most of my life, I thought ideas just showed up.
An idea would arrive in my head and I would treat it rather like an unexpected visitor at the front door.
Well, hello. Where did you come from?
Usually I didn’t bother waiting for an answer.
If the idea looked interesting, I played with it. If it looked useful, I tried to do something with it. If it looked stupid, I occasionally tried to do something with it anyway. That system served me reasonably well for most of my life.
I am now eighty-four years old. I have spent much of those years making things, selling things, promoting things, fixing things, starting businesses and occasionally making an impressive mess of them. While writing about those experiences, I began looking backward at some of the ideas I had once thought had simply “shown up.” That was when I started asking a different question.
What if the idea did not begin at the moment I noticed it?
Something I saw when I was twelve might still matter. So might a machine somebody showed me when I was thirty, a problem I couldn’t solve at forty-five, or a conversation I had last Tuesday. At the time, each could have seemed ordinary and completely unrelated to anything else.
Then I encounter something new.
Something about that new experience connects with something already there, and suddenly I notice a possibility I had not noticed before.
There it is.
The idea.
Because we notice that final moment, we tend to give the moment all the credit. Newton gets the apple. Archimedes gets the bathtub. Some poor bastard drops a chocolate bar into his peanut butter.
Eureka!
But I’m becoming suspicious of Eureka.
The interesting part may not be the moment the lightbulb comes on. The interesting part may be everything that had to be sitting there before the switch could work.
That suspicion eventually led me to what I call the Old Git Model. The name is deliberate. I am the Old Git, and the model grew out of examining my own experiences rather than pretending I had begun with a grand scientific theory. I wanted to know whether I could trace some of my ideas backward and see what had been present before I recognized them as ideas.
One word became particularly useful: encounter.
By an encounter, I mean simply that something meets something else in experience. I see something, hear something, remember something, run into a problem, have a conversation, make a mistake, or discover that the world is not behaving the way I expected. Most encounters may lead nowhere interesting at all. But occasionally one seems to bump into something left by an earlier experience.
For years I would have described the result by saying, “I’ve got an idea.”
Now I am less certain that the idea arrived from nowhere. Perhaps I had an encounter, and perhaps what I called the idea was what became possible when that encounter met the accumulated material of a lifetime.
I don’t claim that every idea works this way. Part of the reason for this website is to keep looking.
The Old Gits Website is a place for collecting those encounters and seeing what, if anything, they bump into. Some will be mine. Some, I hope, will be yours. Some may come from things happening in the world today, and others from things that happened fifty years ago. They may be important, ridiculous, useful, irritating, funny, or things nobody would normally think belonged in the same room together.
Then we’ll let them bump into one another.
Most will probably do nothing.
But every once in a while, I hope we’ll hear a little click.
And somebody will say:
“Well, I’ll be damned. Where the hell did THAT come from?”