Amazing, innovative, world changing ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is key.
Reading this article on TheNextWeb, I find myself shaking my head and returning to a lesson that I picked up this summer.
To set the scene, I spent the summer in the San Francisco Bay-- the very heart of Silicon Valley. At an unspecified tech firm named after a fruit, I worked as an intern during the day. It was certainly an amazing experience, but my off-hours activities were similarly fruitful.
I got to spend a large amount of time with, arguably, some of the smartest people my age in the technology industry. It was an honor to spend a summer with these folks, and the lessons I learned day-to-day have already proved invaluable.
But one lesson sticks out the most. That lesson is the title of this post:
Amazing, innovative, world-changing ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is key.
Now, if this blog is any indication, I think and talk a lot about technology. And in Silicon Valley, conversations about local sports teams and politics take a back-seat to emerging tech, design, and innovation.
And, unsurprisingly, every conversation that dives into these technologies ends up spawning a handful of great ideas of how these technologies could be used in fascinating ways.
Coming from a place (Columbus, Ohio) where cloud computing is still a bit of a hazy term and the tech tuxedo doesn't count as work-appropriate, I was amazed by the sheer volume of brilliance that I encountered.
I mean everyone-- literally everyone-- at some point came up with an amazing idea that I couldn't believe it didn't already exist. Needless to say, only a couple weeks into my internship, I felt I had stumbled onto a goldmine of fantastic ideas that I could sneakily turn into the next big thing.
But then I realized something very peculiar: after a while, each of these great ideas became decreasingly exciting. I wasn't getting desensitized-- but every time an idea came up in conversation, I'd immediately jump to implementation difficulties.
"What if there was a way to connect you to the people around you who share your interests? Use your 'likes' from Facebook and your location data to point you to people around you who you'd probably be good friends with!"
What a great idea! Except:
- How often do you get notified? Every time someone passes me by on the street who also happens to like Breaking Bad?
- How do I create the relationship with this person? Are you going to count on two people running the app, taking out their phone at the same time, and instantly striking up a conversation about Breaking Bad?
- How about people who are nearby, but not in the same location as me. Perhaps they're right on top of me... but 3 floors up.
- How does one determine the difference between things I like on Facebook because they happened to come up on my Newsfeed once, and things that actually define some large part of my personality?
Needless to say that the best ideas have a very long journey from lightbulb to lots of users.
I learned something depressingly important: no matter how amazing an idea is, it's worth nothing without the passionate motivation and keen, strategic execution necessary to turn it into reality. In fact, as the post title suggests, I'd argue that ideas are cheap and tend to be misleading.
So if there's one really big take-away from this, it is as follows:
Stop wasting time trying to find some big, world-changing product to create. Learn how to learn. Learn how to build. Learn how to motivate. Learn how to communicate. Learn how to lead.
Then, it's just a matter of picking the right idea.
