Or Alf (now in Pog Form).
No, I think you’ve missed the point I was making.
Having a 3D XR/AR/MR/VR video walk-through tour of a spaceship is not the same as having a spaceship.
Like others have mentioned, ideas are a dime a dozen. The genius and brilliance comes with turning them into reality. For every genius groundbreaking product thats out there there was probably hundreds of people who already had the same idea years before it became something real.
Apple didn’t invent the idea of the iPad, they took the idea many people had for years and made it real.
You want others to apply their genius and brilliance to bring your idea into reality. It just doesn’t work that way.
Here in the UK, we have an investment TV program called Dragon’s Den.
The US equivalent is Shark Tank.
Both these programs feature investors who can offer huge sums of money, plus decades of business experience.
If you turn up with a working product, you could get an investment and become a millionaire.
If you turn up with just an idea, you get nothing.
The problem is, squish7 is not content with being an ordinary knowledge worker – he/she wants to pitch “world-bending” ideas to “the giants of the field”.
Brain plasticity and mental stamina do degrade with age – slowly at first, but it starts to become definitely measurable around age 40. However, that is probably not the main reason why the odds are against someone coming up with their first invention / scientific discovery / artistic masterpiece at age 39.
The main reason why that rarely happens is this: if you really had the potential to do that, why didn’t you do it already? You’ve had at least 20 years to show the world what an exceptional kind of person you are. If you didn’t produce anything noteworthy during those 20 years, why should anybody expect your next 20 years to be different?
“Late bloomer” artists, inventors etc do exist, but they are very much the exception rather than the rule. Even when someone came up with their great masterpiece at a later age, there’s usually something in their younger years which shows that they were already no ordinary bear. A physicist may get the Nobel Prize at age 60 for a discovery they made at age 42, but when you read their biography you’ll probably find that they had already written some important papers and built up an impressive reputation in the international physics community by age 30. And that early reputation then earned them the access to people, budgets etc which enabled them to make the big discovery.
So when someone is pushing 40 and admits that they have “zero credentials; no successes or work history to speak of”, that tends to make people go “hmm” when that person then claims to have “world-bending” creative and inspirational abilities.
When I gave my advice to squish7 in my previous post to this thread, I didn’t know their age yet and was picturing them as an ambitious twentysomething. At that age, it is still very likely that your claims of being a world-changing creative genius are delusional, but you should at least be given a chance to show the naysayers that they’re wrong. But if you have been an adult for two decades already and you still have “no successes or work history to speak of”, maybe it’s time to adjust your ambitions a bit and consider the possibility that you’re not as brilliant as you thought you were.
Still, that doesn’t change my advice to become an industry insider by doing some more modest projects first, instead of attempting to jump straight to the top. The advantage of that approach is that it’s not an all-or-nothing gamble: you may still end up having a satisfying and profitable career in an interesting field, even if you have to eventually make peace with the fact that you turned out not to be the next reincarnation of Shakespeare.
By the way, squish7, if you have a concrete idea which you believe you will be able to execute if given a budget, you may want to look into a “startup accelerator” such as Y Combinator. You pitch your idea to them, and if you can convince them that the idea is viable and that you have what it takes to execute it, they give you a budget to work on it. They can also bring you into contact with industry insiders and with potential investors for the next funding round. In exchange, they’ll want a seat on the board and a certain percentage of the revenues, if your startup company becomes successful.
Y Combinator expects their startup founders to move to Silicon Valley, but you may be able to find another startup accelerator closer to home. Just google “startup accelerator” plus the name of the nearest large city. Or maybe decide that you are willing to move if that’s what it takes to bring your world-bending ideas to fruition.
Also note that they’ll expect you to do the majority of the work yourself; you can’t just give them the idea, let them do all the work of executing it, and get a big bag of money for coming up with the idea. Also, most startup accelerators tend to be very wary of “loner” startup founders; a group of two to five people willing to commit themselves to the project will have a much better chance of getting funding than a single individual. I think Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, said somewhere “if you cannot convince even a single friend that you and your idea are worth taking a gamble on, then why should we believe differently?”
Walton,
Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense. I agree that squish7 might want to start on modest projects first.
You mentioned late bloomer scientists in detail and I’m wondering about late bloomer artists. What can we often see in their past?
I’m not an expert, but certainly there are lots of examples from history of famous artists showing their talents at a very early age. Mozart was composing symphonies at the age of 4 which were better than what many adults would ever produce with a lifetime of practice; Picasso produced this at age 13. Michelangelo created the Pieta in his early twenties and the statue of David in his late twenties. (And presumably he didn’t buy a huge block of marble with his own pocket money, so he must have built up a reputation before that already, in order to be given that chance.)
I’m not an art historian, so I can’t say for sure how representative these examples are. I guess producing master-level works at age 4 is earlier than the norm, but making your big breakthrough after 30 would be unusually late. I googled “late blooming artists” and pretty much all the examples I could find were either people whose first great work came in their early thirties, or people who had some modest early successes but only broke through later in life. But in all the cases I could find in my quick search, those people were at least already “in the field” by the time of their 30th birthday. Famous rock bands generally started as teenagers. I’m sure exceptions exist, but they will definitely be exceptions and not the norm.
Novelist appears to be the field where being a late-bloomer is most common. J.K. Rowling was a random unemployed nobody until she published the first Harry Potter novel at age 30. Quite a few famous novelists were well past 40 when they made their debut; some of them were already acclaimed journalists or something like that, but others had unremarkable careers in an unrelated field before they suddenly burst onto the bestseller lists. I guess this has something to do with the fact that the basic “technology” of novel-writing hasn’t changed much over the centuries, so a person who writes their first bestseller at 50 has probably been at least a voracious reader since childhood. Harder to do that with a new form of art for which the technology has only existed for a few years.
Excellent advice. If you really have a hundred ideas, pick one of them that can be easily developed - and develop it into a prototype.
Being able to show up with one real product in your hand is going to impress investors a lot more than showing up with a hundred ideas.
emphasis added
Yes. In my real life work, I have worked in the past on the risk investing and still do sometimes for some aspects of my work.
The start-up idea by the loner is one of the surest red-flags as it a very large risk factor and tends to signal the person has problems working in a team or communicating effectively with a team - which in almost all these endeavors is a critical difference between a project failure and a project success.
the mere having of supposedly transformative ideas is not worth a single €, even if true as the practical transformation into a marketable product in these fields (not the solo artistic creation like a painting or a novel, a different challenge) requires a focus, an ability to engage.
the mode of communication and the reaction to any feedback that does not fit his own desired response, seen here and in the prior threads does not give confidence.
Thank you all for your help/feedback/advice, whatever your demeanor on the spectrum of friendly to bitter you’ve operated on 
Below is a grab bag of misc. responses to people since my last post; feel free to look down for your name rather than try to read everything. Thanks, gang, as always
Fine, if you think I put my skillset/mindset in an egotistical manner, then I’m open to suggestion on how to rephrase things in a non-narcissistic manner. I’m listening, really; how would you suggest I put the skillset/mindset/braintype of creating extremely new things and significantly changing the way things are done. Should I use the term “disruptive technology”? Is that okay or do you think that also sounds arrogant?
And what’s wrong with that? Yes, naturally that’s the type of territory we’re talking; entrepreneurship; company-building strategies. This doesn’t 100% have to to take the form of me declaring my own company; if I work with other people in a company-building manner, I’m doing company-starting or company-furthering things/work. You could rephrase your comment “This sounds like entrepreneurship territory”; well, yes, that was the question; tips on pitching to high-level people. That’s a function of entrepreneurship: pitching to investors/etc/etc…
You could opt for a positive attitude with a similar line of thinking; instead of saying I’m obsessed, you could opt to think of me as having a very strong creative drive and determination for what I do, but you have to put it in a negative, insulting manner. Why not try humility and self-reflection and attempts at self-improvement. Maybe there are things you’re not being rational about, and you need to work on your communication with others. You think that accusations I don’t work hard aren’t hurtful personal attacks? You should ask yourself why you’re personally attacking me. We can BOTH say “Well we’re not communciating well, let’s understand each other better”, but I can’t go 100% of the way and buy in to your defamation of me to innocentize and superioritize yourself. I learn a lot from this board and its advice is quite often humbling, and usually useful even if at times it put to me in a cruel manner, and I’m always grateful for all advice given to me. You could ask a similar humbling question, what is it there that you can learn from me?. (I’m sorry if I just fried your brain.) One more way you could be kind and productive instead of stubborn and condescending, is to accept the reality that you’re engaging in discussion/interaction with someone who has a very different braintype than you do; maybe you could work on your communciation and understanding of such type a person, and hence better your own personal communication skills?
Well, I feel that now is the right time to throw all my talents and resources into XR. It’s a combination of XR intrinstically being investable at this point, and my personal workings/projects/etc/etc being in a prime position to move into the field. / I’ll PM you today with some links to my work; I’m still unclear on the nature it’s okay to share this in my profile or in a thread…
First, thank you for your advice/thoughts. About patenting: what more exactly are you saying I shouldn’t try to patent? XR software? What if I have, let’s say, blueprints for an XR glove-controller, something physical that fits right in with the spirit of patenting. Do you think even in that case, I shouldn’t pursue patenting? What about a gray area like mathematical algorithms that deal with physical movement? That’s a tricky area.
Once again, this would be like saying “We have Pong, so we’ve already done all possible video games” or maybe “We’ve made a movie, so we’ve covered all possible technologies that can be invented to make movies”. XR is the goal of being able to add ANYTHING we can possibly see or hear around us. Parkour is an example of a community who will eat up XR for every daily meal once the working tech is here; the ability to run around in any of a zillion potential fathomable worlds… Basically parkour XR will be like being Mario or Luiji or any human sprite/avatar in a video game.
Yes, safety issues like this are very scary to me; it’s something I do put time into addressing/solving.
You’re totally missing my point. My point is that as XR bleeds into reality and we can manipulate the very worlds we see and hear around us, the line between the real and virtual become blurred. What if one goes far beyond a “walk-through” spaceship, e.g. a more immersive spaceship we can use in a gaming world. When we start to see and hear the spaceship all around us, we’ve moved away from fiction and are starting to actually bring the spaceship into reality. (I suppose a mundane middle-ground would be to consider a spaceship gaming engine, which in theory at least could be patented.) It’s like they refrain: a 100% perfect simulation of reality would be indistinguishable from reality itself. XR is our gateway to the Matrix.
Thank you for the reminder, it serves a slight purpose at this point to be reminded of this principle, but it’s getting a bit repetitive, and it’s kind of obvious to begin with. I probably should throw away the word “idea” when I talk about my projects and be more specific.
Okay, okay, okay… I’ve absorbed ten times over the “ideas are cheap; implementations are valuable” stutter. Thank you for the extent to which it’s been helpful to be reminded of that, really, but it’s getting old. I guess I should choose my words more carefully? Instead of saying “my ideas”, should I use a more concrete word like “implementations” or “applications” or “solutions”? Why do you put negative spin on things, like if I say “ideas”, you say I mean “ideas [that I don’t actually work on]” or “ideas [that I have no ability to execute]” or “ideas [I want other people to go make a reality and don’t plan on doing a damn thing to further myself]?” It’s just silly and rude. 
I’m a “he”.
I do understand your skepticism but you barely know anything about me. You’re taking educated guesses; they may be tolerable or even smart guesses, but they happen to be very off-target. My age has absolutely nothing to do with anything. If you look back I’ve talked about my braintype; ADD, schizoaffective, etc. If you’re going to psychoanalyze me why not look at what I’ve put directly in front of you and explained to you instead of bringing other things into it. People of my braintype are known to function like I do; we do creative, different things; we don’t fit into standard practices. It’s a lifetime thing; I’ve always worked in very different ways with all the mediums I’ve dealt with, be it fiction, websites, piano/guitar, songwriting, coding, sports, patenting, entrepreneurship, youtube videos, tutorials, poems, etc, etc…
A whole lot of the stuff I’ve done in my life is online; do you want to look at it all, or just keep guessing? I’d like someone to directly tell me it’s okay to post a bunch of links becuase I’m tired of all this ass-out-of-u-and-me-ing going on :).
The problem is that these past projects aren’t really relevant to XR, where I’m going. If you understood ADD in detail (I’m not blaming you for not understanding it, of course! You could learn something here, though), you’d know that even in the highest-level professional world, people with ADD can bounce around from project to project or company to company or even field to field. It’s a very natural, established pattern for me to be very creative in one field, and then feel the need to move over to something very different. The common principle throughout everything in my case, is the inventiveness, the drive to take what I’m involved with and radicalize it; change it; rehash things and do something totally new with my surroundings and then evangelize the new methods and their value to others. That’s who I am.
Here’s something akin you can grasp a bit easier: There’s the concept of a “serial entrepreneur”; entrepreneurs who aren’t limited to a single field or category of projects; they’re just good at whatever company they’re starting. That’s a little like me.
I can link you to 10 years of online crap of mine, can I post those links for you or would that look like spam?
I’m not a board admin, but I doubt they’ll mind. If you’d posted a new thread with the OP consisting mostly of links, that’d be different, but we’re here on the second page of a thread which is all about you, so a bunch of links to your prior work will certainly count as being relevant to the topic at hand.
I understand that you obviously think that all of the above makes you extremely proficient, seasoned, accomplished and unique but I feel I must point out that one Pres. Donald J Trump has also mastered all of those various mediums and endeavors, while simultaniously finding the time to have multiple romps of bareback, unprotected anal sex (“RawwDawgg Roulette”) with a fatt-assed prostitute/C-List Porn Star, all while his Slovenian, former High-Priced Call Girl wife was at home caring for their newborn son.
Clearly you have much work ahead.
That’s what I’ve done with my “athletic XR” idea, that is, focus on developing/applying one idea. In today’s digital/abstract world, development doesn’t necessarily mean holding something in your hand, or not even a finished working program. People in physics and mathematics have won nobel-prizes for algorithms and formulas; something doesn’t have to be a working prototype to be valuable and influential. I happen to use a grab-bag of different mediums when developing my ideas toward tangibility. Things like patent drafting and concept images work toward the goal of a tangible product. Now yes, of course, I need to be working within a team of other people in which we all contribute our skills toward the goal; I just haven’t found (or put together) my team yet.
Ramira: Why do you prefer to defame me, put me down, talk crap about me, when you could choose to use your experience and knowledge to put your advice in a productive tone? You could offer this same information with an optimistic attitude such as “Usually this is a red flag, so here’s some advice on overcoming that” or at least wish me luck solving these problems or something rather than talking down to me.
Thanks for answering! My next post will be about my past work; maybe that will be more productive.
Thanks for your advice, everyone, even you, Ramira. 
Except that, if that were true, you wouldn’t need to go on a general-interest message board and ask random people for advice.
If you were a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience, and if you were good at being that kind of serial entrepreneur, you’d know how to get in touch with the giants of a field by now, because you would have done it before. You would have a big address book full of people you met on your previous adventures, who know people who can get you in touch with the people you want to pitch to. And they’d be happy to make those connections for you, because they’d know from previous experience working with you that you will make a positive impression on those giants, and hence they will indirectly gain some brownie points too.
That’s how it works in the world of actual successful serial entrepreneurs. I know a few such people, and while it’s true that they tend to get restless and distracted after working on the same thing for more than a year or two, one thing they sure don’t need help with anymore by the time they’re 39, is how to ingratiate themselves with influential people who can open doors for them.
I am not just taking educated guesses; I am going by your own words, from the OP of this thread that you have zero track record or success history. Sure, entrepreneurs don’t always succeed on the first attempt; in fact, the story of “the first company I started went broke, and so did the second, but eventually the ninth attempt was successful and now I’m a billionaire” is so common that it’s a cliché. But even a failed startup company still counts as a track record, and should have given you some real-world experience and contacts which should improve your chances for the next attempt. If you have done that kind of “leveling up” already in your 20-odd year career, it’s not coming through in your writing at all so far.
Since that quote you have highlighted was the generic professional observation highlighting and confirming the observation of Walton Firm it is odd you call it defaming you:
I would suggest that you should first ask yourself that if you are unable to absorb the modest inputs that your style of the communication here is not one that gives confidence to persons who do not know you but are only processing what you present, then perhaps you should think if there is not something you should try to change, starting here even.
It is rare that I have seen the very thin skinned project promoter progress well.
I am not your personal coach nor do I have an optimistic reading from what you yourself communicate.
The observatoin, a generic one responding to Walton, is the real world observation.
If you find it difficult to process, I can only tell you that in the real risk financing and investment world where they are impatient, their time is money, and they are bombared with lots of the crappy ideas by persons as burningly convinced as you of their own brilliance, there is not a coaching attitude.
Yes.
from my own experience this is a good observation.
It is sine qua non to demonstrate ability to work in a team at some level and a degree of the persistance.
There’s a difference between inventing something and simply coming up with an idea for something. If you have something invented, something real, pitch to a VC. But be prepared to show some sort of proof of concept and to demonstrate something more than just atypical brain chemistry. A complete lack of successes or work history is going to hurt you.
You can’t roll pennies because you’ll kill someone? Starting your own company means you’ll end up doing a lot of boring tasks unless you get or have the funding to hire pennyrollers. As every dime you pay someone else to roll pennies is a dime taken away from your baby/project- think carefully about who you want to do the small tasks.
I’ll kindly suggest to squish7 that the reason you’re getting a lot of hostility and skepticism is that there are thousands upon thousands of anonymous people on the internet who proclaim their brilliance and amazing talents, and most of them are either lying or delusional. You may be in that category, or you may actually have incredible talent, but there’s no way to confirm that through mere anonymous text on a message board.
If you can’t deign to do the little things, why should anyone trust you to actually do the big things?