My father was an inventor, and sometimes people would say to him, “I have an idea … the desert needs water … let’s go in business together.” Eight times out of ten, what these people had was not an idea at all—it was an impulse.

Merely recognizing a need for an idea is very far from having the idea. Anyone who undertook to handle such an impulse would have had to add ninety-nine percent to make anything of it. Finding the need is not creation, as it does not change anything. After you find the need, then you first go to work to fill it.

Ways of testing such an impulse will be given later, although this example is so exaggerated that no one would have to test it to know it was ridiculous. Or is it? What about irrigation reclamation projects which have made parts of some deserts to bloom? The virtues of an idea-seed are by no means always obvious.

Since everything starts with an idea, the subject covers enormous territory, as does the definition. However the word “idea” as employed in this book will be the popular and colloquial usage, not the philosophical or technical.

What I am discussing, really, is how to produce a good or practical plan, a suggestion, a new approach, a solution to a problem. An idea, then, starts as an idea-seed, a notion, a vague conception or supposition, a thought or mental impression, from which the idea itself is then developed.

The idea-seed begins as something to which as yet there is no corresponding reality. At the outset it is fantasy, or a fiction or a figment of the imagination.

After it is developed, it will be a plan or purpose or action, an intention or a design. It will be an accurate image or concept of an object which is either tangible or intangible, either concrete or abstract.

Impulses are often valuable beginnings of ideas and they should not be ignored or neglected. Write them down and save them; and some time you’ll find that they combine with other thoughts to make something interesting.

In that statement is a clue to a real idea. An idea is a new combination of old elements. Ideas are for certain pur­poses—to overcome difficulties, to improve things, to enter­tain or attract, to find good or different ways of doing things.