Synthesis.

Know what I really enjoy?  Those days when it seems like everything you read and everyone you talk to seems to be continuing a conversation about a particular topic.

Now, there's a good chance that this only happens to me because of my lack of self-awareness, which leads me to turn every conversation back to me, and the topics I want to talk about.  I'm working on that.

Nevertheless, I enjoy ricocheting through conversations and articles.  Once in a while, the stars line up and two ideas smash into each other like particles in the hadron collider, creating a crystallizing effect where a bunch of concepts from random areas arrange themselves into a new coherence.  Was that too many metaphors? I counted four in two sentences.

In a recent interview with Success magazine, Marc Ostrofsky, a dotcom entrepreneur and author, said that the people who really make it aren't the 'creators'.  They're the 'producers' - like in the movie biz - the ones who can take the right actor, the right director, the right investors, and the right screenplay and put them in the same room.  It doesn't need to be the titans of any of those fields.  It does need the right chemistry.

While I may not be a venture capitalist like Ostrofsky, I like this idea. Apple needed Steve Wozniak to develop the software, but it REALLY needed Steve Jobs to do the other, less concrete work of figuring out how to get an awesome idea from being stuck in a brain or in prototype mode to out - to the masses.  Maybe I like this idea because my particular stengths involve digesting information, creating ideas, and recognizing people's differences but also how people are connected (by the way, if you've never read and done online test for the book 'Strengthsfinder 2.0' go do it.  I hate personality tests, but this was REALLY enlightening).  So I'm kind of wired for connecting people who complement each other strategically.

Collecting information from disparate sources is a valuable way to come up with a new solution for an old problem.  Chances are, if you're a schoolteacher, you might have a problem similar to one that farmers have been solving for years with a principle that you can bring across.

What's your opinion?  Tell me what your thoughts are.  Because I'm selfish, and I don't get smarter if I don't learn anything from you.  Leave me a comment and lets keep the conversation going.