Ask HN: I'm an idea guy. Apparently I'm worth nothing?
I have seen from a lot of places that it's not ideas that count, but the execution. This leaves me in a quandary. I have ideas, all the time, every second of every day. Every piece of information I come across, whether it be an article here on HN, my rss feed or on the web, gives me ideas. Walking down the street I see something, it gives me an idea. I sit at home, drinking and watching the fire, I have ideas. They never stop coming. Never.
I have worked, consulted and taught and mentored people, and been successful (meaning made them be successful), because I have ideas. But as I look around me, I see no way to "monetize" (how I hate that misused word) my skill.
Now it's not that I don't know that execution is king. Part of my success with helping people, companies etc, is due to the fact that I believe in (and enforce) disciplined execution. Take an idea and do it. Do it, do it, do it. But my strength is in ideas. I hear something from someone and immediately come up with ideas about it. It's what I do. It's what I'm excellent at.
The latest idea I have come up with to solve my problem is to follow through on the premise that "information wants to be free". I will be shortly putting up a website where I will put all my ideas out there (I'm thinking under a creative commons license) for anyone to take and use and execute. I really hope some people from here will find something on it that they can run with and make the big "exit". Or have fun with. Or ridicule in a constructive manner (I'm a big fan of iteration). Most of all I hope someone will chat with me about the ideas. My forte is improvising and exploring ideas with another person. I'm a real jack-of-all-trades so I'm held back on a lot of things because I don't have the in depth knowledge. (Especially math related ideas, I have a crap load of stuff I want to explore in the math world but my abilities are sorely lacking due to an extended period in my life when I was a child and missed out on school. But I really want to explore them) But I seem to have a skill in bringing out that knowledge from people who do know. And I am always learning as I go.
But I would like to know some of your thoughts about what kind of place there is in this world for for a person such as I, whose ideas take him into places that are far out of his depth, ability and means, but who knows he can make a contribution, and change the world. Please, don't hold back, I am pretty thick skinned, critism only makes me more informed. One thing to keep in mind: I don't want to go the way of the guru. I don't want to be the best in a field. I have to keep a beginners mind. It is the only thing that keeps the ideas coming.
21 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] threadAnybody can come up with an idea, many less can design how that idea will be executed.
I get cool ideas for things to do every day, probably enough to fill a few man years. I've got to filter that stream down to a very small list that fits my available time and resources. Since I've got a long backlog of my own ideas, I'm not all that interested in develop other people's ideas -- unless they're writing me a good paycheck.
People's time in evaluating your ideas isn't free; turning one of your ideas into a rough estimate of the resources needed to execute it, and of potential market prospects, can be hours or days of work.
One of my big complaints about X-Forge and X-Hub open source sites is that they encourage people to put out huge volumes of software out there without documentation, marketing materials, or even an elevator pitch that explains what the software does. I suppose some of that software could save me a lot of development time, but I know I could spend hours a day downloading, compiling and testing software that I'll never use... So I don't, not unless the people put some effort into marketing the project and explaining why I should care.
The 'math deficiency' particularly concerns me, largely because of what I experienced when I used to teach Physics. One of the most common things I'd hear from the C-and-under students was "I understand the concepts, but I can't solve the problems." Well, helping the student was a process much like debugging an expert system: and inevitably, along the way, I'd discover what the student had in his 'knowledge base' and find that he didn't understand the concepts at all.
I've got a superpower which may be similar to what you've got: I can research a topic for a shockingly little amount of time (sometimes even 20 minutes) and impersonate an expert.
I've given talks at conferences on all sorts of subjects -- if I had 3 days to prepare, I could be a stand-in for any speaker at TED and pretty much get away with it. That's despite being (historically) two standard deviations below the mean on appearance and many other skills related to presentation. I'm just really good at attacking a body of literature, building a knowledge base, and telling stories about it.
That's a skill that kept me out of academia, despite my PhD, because it calls the whole system into question: why do you need to give people tenure and put them through so much training when this guy can come in and 'pass' for one of them.
What am I doing about it? First, I'm targeting those areas where my interpersonal skills are weak. Second, I'm working on breaking down my narrative reprocessing skills into something a computer can do, to create something like an 'amateur system.'
Now excuse me while I go execute my idea...
I want people to evaluate my ideas (maybe) but I don't want them to do the shit-work. Most of my ideas are formed enough that I know the resources that will be needed, and I've been in business long enough to do the market research and think about whether or not the idea could be viable. But some of the ideas are "pure" ideas. Not products, or software or services. (BTW I am with you on all the forge-hub syndrome)
The math deficiency for me is a problem in that I have missed out on some basics somewhere, and I have been forever trying to catch up to them. I think maybe I am the opposite of what you described, because I couldn't really get the concepts of math, but I could solve the problems, but only through my own convoluted, invented version of math I devised. This has hurt me a more than a few ways: one through school, where i would get the right answer on tests, but in showing my workings, the teacher would be thinking "WTF?!?" secondly, when trying to work through something like Knuth's TAOCP, the math would hold me back, because I can't understand what he wants me to understand. And I know that it is important not to just solve the problems, but to understand why they are solved that way. It's a shame your 'skill' kept you out of academia. Maybe someone can pass for them, but no 'faker' can contribute what the good PhDs have to knowledge. (And no fake PhD has contributed what smart 'uneducated' people have over the millenia) Now get back to making your idea real, and thanks for the input.
So make your idea engine tangible. The website thing sounds like a fine idea to try - mostly because you will foster connections with other people.
"I will be shortly putting up a website where I will put all my ideas out there (I'm thinking under a creative commons license) for anyone to take and use and execute."
Do it! And then share the link with us here on HN. Looking forward to it.
Currently, there are so many ideas out there that the issue is to filter the ideas, rather than generate them. Perhaps when communication was much more difficult, the problem was generation of ideas (this makes sense to me: people had less diverse knowledge. I believe diversity of experience/knowledge is crucial to idea generation). But now? There are too many ideas -- and good ones -- out there for me to pay attention to others' ideas.
Also, there's the sexiness factor. Fact is, it's fun to generate ideas. You get to estimate, assume, project, modify, and change. Actual execution? That's the boring part, or at least the less-sexy cousin. I'd love to just sell ideas, but the fact remains that there's much more of a supply than of demand.
Put your email in your profile!
The thing about ideas is that you can't really test how they will perform in the reality because they are not _real_. For example as a programmer I have tons of ideas about how to execute a given task. In my head it's very easy (and fun) to see my implementation play out. But it's only when you actually start to make the idea real that unforseen problems come into existence - this is a good thing, it's iteration. But without making the idea tangible, I would argue you cannot realistically measure an idea right?
Put another way ideas can only be iterated in your mind. That's great if you are a philosopher (hey you should really be a philosopher). But I think most things that yield empirical data need to exist in reality and therefore you need execution.
This is of course taking nothing away from philosophy. Maybe that's what you've been looking for? Or perhaps a futurist or something. You can "sell ideas" via books right? But then again writing a book is creating something tangible =)
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Reading some of your other responses I can see that you take idea iteration quite seriously. This very well puts you leagues above guys that want to "make twitter better" or what not. But I think you need to accept that idea guys are more akin to starving artists. You should create ideas because you love to create ideas, not because you want to monetize them (that's what action is for). This also analogs nicely with philosophers, and other academics. They have to risk "some other guy" ultimately getting credit for work they've also explored. Also academics don't _necessarily_ get paid to "think", they get paid to _teach_ and think.
I think people are willing to pay for ideas (or even a book) from someone who has proved that at least one of their ideas has had value.
Well off to finish creating my "Customer Evolution System" a piece of software that is a hybrid of the Customer Development process monitoring and a CRM I hope I can get a beta version done by the end of March and have some people here try it out, as it is especially designed with startups in mind. Then maybe pg will overlook the single founder problem and I can enter it into the next YC.
Thanks everyone on here for their time, and btw, I have added my email into my profile if anyone else has any more comments.
That's not a rare skill. Lots of people do it. Many of them are also good at execution.
The latter limits your market somewhat. You're competing for the attention of good executers who don't have good ideas with all of the folks with lame ideas, not just folks like yourself. There are some very natural reactions to that situation that drive them to prefer working with executers who have ideas instead of going with "an idea guy".
The other problem is that there "we" have more good ideas than we can ever hope to implement.
Perhaps you need a story that isn't about you or your ideas in the abstract. Most people prefer stories about them.
As for the market, I am trying to discover if there even is a market for what I am good at. I don't care if it is limited, I am just wondering if the fact that someone can have original ideas that are important may well go the way of the dodo. Is inventiveness becoming a commodity? If you look back hundreds of years ago, a lot of major discoveries were arrived at independently in a fairly close time frame. That was with fewer people in the world, and even fewer of them educated (comparing to modern times). Nowadays I am pretty sure that every idea I may have is being thought up by 500 other people at the same time. Will there be any value in me trying to refine myself as an idea maker? To make better ideas? Or will something like YC eventually be a place for a team to apply with their skills then pick an interesting idea from the twittersphere and execute it to phenomenal success?
By the way, I am not shy of execution (I have been self employed most of my life) and I have seen plans through to fulfillment. I just feel that when I am managing the details, making every point of an idea go through, I am not doing what I am best at. You are completely right about having more ideas than we can implement. I just don't like this status quo, and I'm trying to find a way to change it. I am sorry, but I completely didn't understand your last sentence. I should make a story about who?
Sorry - I switched gears and started responding to your presentation.
Knowledge and experience are humbling, they teach you just how hard people had to work to get us to where we are now. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if you did have a sound base of mathematical knowledge, you wouldn't have many ideas because you'd realise just how hard it is to create a novel proof.
Ideas aren't worth squat because the overwhelming majority of them are complete bunk. Ideas are like a big pile of dirt - the value comes from the digging and sifting and smashing and polishing that gets you the gems. Action is what creates value.
Find enough guys like me, and you could actually make a comfortable living.
Not sure how you'd actually implement something like that, though. No way to prove an idea was originally yours (because, realistically, somebody has probably thought of most of it before).
I do like the idea of an ideas website, though. Maybe with a mechanism so other people can post theirs? Maybe with a donation mechanism... Entrepreneurs have lots of extra ideas, and the ones they don't have time to implement they post on the ideas site. If I make a million dollars off an idea there, I donate a couple grand to the original author.
Future partnership is a strong incentive... but that implies that the "idea" guy can give added value beyond the initial idea, which may or may not be true.
Maybe you find some inspiration on their website: http://www.brainstore.com
http://www.innovationtools.com/Products/ideamanagement.asp
I looked through a bunch of these when I was approached to make an enterprise level IMS for a large chemical company (30,000+ employees). The software is not complicated, but because of the use of the word "innovation" it becomes rather pricey, very quickly especially when you charge by the seat. I put together a prototype for them, but lost the tender in the end. But its this prototype which I am adapting to put on my website.