On Saturday evening I found myself on a bar stool swigging a beer and chomping on a rump steak burger, medium rare.

This kid and his dad came in and sat on the 2 stools right next to me, and I spent the next 30 minutes hearing snippets of their conversation.

The young guy must have been 18, but to my advanced years he looked about 3.  Handsome, well dressed and full of life, I heard him tell his Dad that he knew he’d be successful and wealthy.  “I know I will. I just know I will.”

I heard him tell his Dad his big plan – how he was going to retake his A-Levels, then get a job in an advertising or marketing agency, didn’t matter which because he’d just learn what they did and move on, then start up a DJ business and open his own club.  He was bursting with ideas, and was certain in his future success, but something in what he was saying was niggling me.

His stoicism.

He was reeling off a list of things that he planned on doing, but none of it seemed personal.  He could have been reading from the phone book.

He was so focused on being successful and wealthy that it sounded to me like he’d come to believe that the end justifies the means.  He thought being successful and wealthy was an end-point in itself, a place where everything would become peachy enough for him to relax and be happy.

Success and wealth are NOT end points.  Success is simply how you define and derive meaning from what you do and wealth is just something that happens from time to time while you’re busy doing your thing.

I love how he had ideas, and I love that he was bright enough to have a plan based around those ideas.  Ideas are important.  Without ideas we’d be pushing everything around on square wheels or sitting in front of Fox News.

Ideas are particularly important for a generation of workers who are competing more than ever to get into the workplace and find meaningful work.

The folks over at Brazen Careerist have understood this, putting ideas at the centre of their new site (launched today; go take a look at some amazing people who I respect to pieces).

But while ideas are important, the thing to remember is that it’s easy to come up with them, you do it all day long.  Ideas are just thoughts; thoughts about what you could do, how you could do it, how things could be or how you could be.  Ideas are daydreams, meanderings, whisperings – sometimes solid and practical, sometimes nebulous and nonsensical.

Ideas are ten a penny, so what’s important are ideas that have a personal resonance, a meaning that makes inaction impossible.

What’s important is an idea that shares the same breath that keeps you alive.

It takes guts to recognise those ideas and it takes real confidence to give them space to grow.  It’s always safer to go along with the cheap, easy stuff.  It’s easy to go forwards when what’s on the line doesn’t matter to you.

When I spoke with this kid and his Dad, I got to like him, and I did see some sparks of fire and flashes of inspiration – he just needs to listen to them.