Every day there are million dollar ideas around us. We see them (movies), hear them (iPod), feel them (air conditioner), taste them (Vitamin water), and smell them (perfume). I would argue that most people have had at least ten $1 million dollar ideas throughout there lives, but why don’t those ideas become reality?
The Million Dollar Homepage
One million dollar idea that I heard of was pretty simple—so simple that you get mad at yourself for not thinking of it first. The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator.[1]
Keyword = Notepad
When asked how he came up with the idea Alex responded “It was a muggy summer’s night late in August (2005), the time around midnight, and there I was, lying on my bed with a notepad, brainstorming ideas to make money.” The keyword in this sentence is notepad. Alex knew that he should write down all of the ideas that came to his mind until he found one that resonated with him. Sometimes it takes a million million dollar ideas to find that one, but if you don’t write them down, you’ll forget—and those don’t count.
Every day I keep a pen and quarter-page sheet of plain paper in my pocket for my ideas. Simply having it opens my mind to seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling ideas. If ideas knock on our door and we never answer, eventually they stop knocking. I don’t act on all of my ideas, but I acknowledge them by writing them down. As a result, I’m working on a few that I think have the potential to be BIG.
