Do you practice safe idea sex?
I used to work for an IP camera startup almost ten years ago. Sounds a bit boring, right? It was anything but.
I got to travel the world, learn new skills, and more importantly, bring ideas into reality by helping to improve the products. The flagship camera when I joined the new company was interesting, to say the least.
The owner, who literally thought he had traveled through time — talk about a red flag — was as intelligent as he was strange. He started the company after making millions with a previous venture and being spurned from their management team.
He ventured off to make his own company with one of the best possible motivations out there — vengeance!
His expertise? Mechanical engineering with a specialization in optics.
His hobbies? Being slightly insane and constantly tinkering with puzzles like Rubik’s cubes.
The product? A remote-controlled security camera for the home with the look and feel of a Rubik’s cube.
This is what is meant by idea sex.
You take two concepts, hobbies, ideas, or even expertise, and combine them to make something beautiful—hopefully.
If you look around at a lot of products we use every day, you can kind of imagine how idea sex worked to create them.
Fax machines are physical letters combined with telephones. They later had grandchildren and invented emails. Their great-grandchildren reside in our phones in the form of Whatsapp and Telegram.
Take a fun minute today and look around at some of your favorite things. Can you split them into two parts and put yourself in the inventor’s shoes?
Who knows, maybe you’ll create the next best thing to peanut butter tuna sandwiches and create something as amazing as ice + cream. Where would Ben & Jerry be without that invention? Probably just having non-idea sex like boring people.
Anyway, I wrote about it extensively in this fun article, check it out!
Would you travel across the world into an active war zone to bring your buddies a beer? This nutter did. And no one believed him until he wrote a book about it 4 decades later.
Speaking of nutters, perhaps you’d be interested in reading my humorous account of a terrible roommate I had last year—just be prepared for a surprise ending. (Or does that spoil the surprise? hmm)
Lastly, if you’re nerdish like me and know how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, you’ll probably enjoy 9 of these other cool mind teasers puzzles.
I’ve played a few of them over the years and I always enjoy the challenge—before I throw them through the wall in frustration, of course. Luckily, some of them are made of durable metal.
That’s it for this week! I’m slowly cracking away at two side projects which I’m excited to share in a month or two. One is another humor book and the other is more of a long-term project I’ve been procrastinating on for a year—luckily I finally found my mojo again—to the detriment of humor readers everywhere!
As always, thanks for reading! Go fry up a PB&T and thank me later.
J.J. Pryor
FYI: My heart goes out to anyone that clicks the heart button!