Your ideas suck
I keep getting YouTube ads for Base44. Their tagline is, "Turn your ideas into apps." That's a pretty compelling pitch.
There's only one problem: your ideas suck.
Good ideas are rare. More often than not, the ideas we come up with are either neutral or, worse, actively detrimental to the organization.
Even in the age of AI, where we're all supposedly equals in terms of output, only a handful of people consistently become top performers. If everyone can write code at roughly the same speed, why do certain people rise to the top? Because they identify good ideas more frequently than everyone else.
That naturally raises the question: How do I identify good ideas? The answer is probably time and experience. But another useful approach is to seek buy-in from the people who matter. Anyone can tell you your idea is good. But the moment it costs them something, they'll tell you what they really think.
Ask questions like:
- Are people willing to pay for this?
- Are people willing to spend their time building it?
- Are people willing to stake their reputation on it?
AI tempts us to isolate ourselves. Why collaborate when I can whip up a prototype in thirty minutes?
But getting buy-in before writing code is critical. People often say prototypes can be thrown away, but in my experience, they're far less willing to change course once they've invested time and effort into building something.
My final advice: keep experimenting. Bring your stupid ideas to life. There's nothing wrong with that. Just be careful once those ideas start costing other people their time.