idea man

I thought for certain that I had posted about this some time in the past, but my searches through the archives have turned up nothing, so here it goes again.

One of my pet peeves is when someone divides people into the groups of the idea people and the implementers with the assumption that the idea people don't need to know how the work is done and the implementers don't need to have good ideas. I have actually heard it stated both ways where either the idea person is superior because of greater creative brains or the implementer is superior because he or she actually does the work and has perfected that work to an art. I never have felt comfortable with either position, and I think I finally have an answer as to why.

In the test that I took that reiterated my tendency to get uptight a few other scores stuck out to me as well. Specifically, I scored slightly higher than average in "Imagination" (implementing plans versus making plans), in the upper third in "Complexity" (drawn to simplicity versus complexity), and in the bottom third in "Scope" (detail oriented versus big picture oriented). The first two appear to show me with a bias to making the plans, but the last one appears to indicate that I have a bias for dealing with the implementation details. This means that it would be hard for me to be happy only focusing on one or the other, and this explains why I don't like what I see as the false dichotomy between generating ideas and generating actual output.

When I got a better understanding of how the scores work I did have a better appreciation for how some people really are born to create ideas and plans and some are born to implement those ideas and plans. There actually are people who are not meant to be creative or are not meant to implement a structured plan. I would prefer that the extremes would not be mistaken for the norms, though. Some people are born to do both.