I am eighty-four years old, and for as long as I can remember, ideas have been showing up in my head.
Some were good. Some were terrible. Some made money. Some lost money. Some became businesses or inventions. Others sat around for years doing absolutely nothing until some later experience made them useful.
For most of my life, I never gave much thought to where those ideas came from. I treated them as though they simply appeared.
Then, at eighty-four, I started writing a book about my life.
The book began as a collection of stories from a fairly wandering life: radio, television, restaurants, advertising, franchising, inventions, businesses, failures, successes, and eventually my attempt to create an entirely new sport called NimBall.
As I tried to explain where those businesses, inventions, and other ideas had come from, I began noticing something I had largely ignored while I was living through them.
The ideas did not seem to appear from nowhere.
Again and again, I could trace part of an idea to something I had encountered earlier: something I had seen, heard, learned, tried, misunderstood, remembered, or even forgotten until another experience brought it back into play.
That gave me a different way to look at an idea.
Something happens now. I encounter something. That new encounter meets something already accumulated from an earlier experience. Usually nothing remarkable happens. Sometimes I simply recognize what I am seeing and go happily on my way. But every once in a while, things that had no obvious reason to belong together seem to connect, and I recognize a possibility that was not there for me before.
That interested me far more than merely writing my autobiography.
So I began asking a very simple question:
Where the hell did that idea come from?
Trying to answer that question changed the book. It also led me to a working framework I call the Old Git Model. The name is intentional: I am the Old Git, and the model grew from examining my own experiences and asking what seemed to happen before I recognized an idea.
I am not presenting the Old Git Model as a settled scientific explanation of how every human mind works. It is a model built from observation—first from my own life—that gives me a way to ask better questions about ideas, memory, experience, and the connections among them.
And that is why this website exists.
The Old Gits Website is not intended to be a museum devoted to my ideas. My stories give us one collection of experiences to examine, but I am much more interested in what happens when other people’s experiences enter the mix.
Everybody accumulates encounters over a lifetime: things seen, heard, learned, misunderstood, forgotten, remembered, tried, abandoned, loved, hated, fixed, and broken. Most seem ordinary when they happen.
Until something else comes along.
Here, I want to collect some of those stories, observations, questions, and odd little moments. We can look at what they encounter, what they remind us of, and whether anything interesting happens when experiences that seemed unrelated wind up in the same room.
Sometimes we may discover a connection. Sometimes we may discover absolutely nothing.
That’s fine.
Because the question I have become interested in is not simply:
“Do you have a good idea?”
It is:
“What did you encounter—and what did it bump into?”
Welcome to The Old Gits Website.
Let’s see what shows up.