"sam is typing..."

The purpose of my blog is to put my thoughts out there. Pretty simple, I imagine it's a pretty common purpose for blogs to have. I believe that new ideas come from context and other people's ideas. And that even sticking my own unfinished ideas on a blog might contribute to somebody else's great idea. It's even possible that somebody else could be me in the future.

This plays nicely into my ideas about things being incremental. Incremental thought, maybe. It began as "by writing things down, especially the incomplete stuff, I can come back and build on it later". It's become "If I publish these unfinished thoughts, others can come and find them - and maybe finish them themselves". There's the added bonus that this works for any number of people. Everyone would likely find a new way to finish a thought - figure out their own connections. By publishing things, I don't take away from myself and I potentially help others.

For this reason (and, I'm sure, some others), guarding your ideas doesn't help anyone. We all combine thoughts differently anyway. By letting the thought go somewhere I know I can find it again, I can move on to new thoughts.

This is far from a new idea. Open source is exactly this but for software. There's most likely some form of this thought present in a large number of publications from the past several centuries too. It touches on Brian Eno's concept of scenius, and even Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. I probably need all this confirmation and similarity to give me the courage to keep publishing my thoughts.

And hey, maybe I'll improve my writing while I'm at it.