The Prospector's Dilemma

You have ideas.

That's never been the problem. You see connections others miss. You stumble across insights in the shower, while walking, in the middle of unrelated conversations. Your notes app is a graveyard of half-formed brilliance. Your voice memos are full of "oh, what if—"

Ideas come easily. What comes hard is making them matter.

You've watched people with worse ideas get further. They packaged something obvious and made millions. They said something you'd been thinking for years and got the credit. They strip-mined a vein you discovered and built an empire while you were still mapping the geology.

Or maybe you're on the other side. You're good at extraction—finding the actionable nugget in someone else's rambling insight. You can turn theory into tactics. But you're starting to wonder if you're just a miner working someone else's claim. Where's your gold?

Or maybe you're caught in a loop. You find ideas, you share ideas, you move on to the next idea. Nothing compounds. Nothing builds. You're a prospector who keeps striking gold and then wandering off before you dig.

However you got here, you're playing the Idea Game. And you might not be able to see what you're standing on.

Let's make it visible.

What Is the Idea Game?

The Idea Game answers one question: What can we extract and apply right now?

This is the game of finding useful concepts and making them actionable. Mining the territory for things that work. Translating insight into tactics that produce results.

It's the most common game online because it's the safest. Ideas can be shared without revealing much about who you are. You can play the Idea Game behind a faceless account, never risking identity capture, endlessly extracting and distributing value.

But the Idea Game has a brutal economy: ideas are worth almost nothing until they're applied, and application is where the value gets captured.

The person who has the insight and the person who profits from it are usually different people. This isn't a conspiracy. It's the structure of the game. Ideas flow freely. Implementation is scarce. The bottleneck gets the value.

If you don't understand this, you'll spend your life generating wealth for other people while wondering why your brilliance doesn't translate into anything tangible.