There seems to be a general misconception around the notion of ideas;
Since everybody can have them, what becomes important is whether you do something about them and – more importantly – how you do something about them.
Let me try to explain while I think this is inaccurate in a startup context:
Even if everybody can have an idea, and the important part is putting some work into making it happen, all ideas are not equal.
Ideas suffer from the same fatal flaw as the idea about agile work methods;
As long as you work in increments, it doesn’t matter what you work on, because you can always toss it quickly if it goes nowhere.
While that particular argument makes logic sense, in reality it becomes a license to not think too much about what you do and why, and I think that is a totally flawed approach.
The same goes for ideas; if the idea doesn’t matter, because you can always get a new one, you don’t make an effort into getting the original idea and the result risk becoming…meeh.
What you should do instead is work on the idea itself. Challenge your idea, make it sharper and ask some tough questions of it.
Make every effort you can to ensure that when you decide to put some real work into figuring out whether it’s desirable, feasible and viable, it is actually something really worth doing.
For this you have all the tools available for testing your assumptions and hypothesis. And instead of falling into the trap of thinking that those are the important tools and the original idea matter less, use it to spur your great idea on and tell yourself that no idea, you can come up with, is so grand and/or complex that there aren’t immediate ways to test it properly.
Be ambitious, for God’s sake, rather than lazy. That’s all I am saying.
And now go and look at those ideas of your again, challenge them and go as big as you can when you start testing them.
That’s how stars are born!
(Photo: Pixabay.com)