The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback. Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience.

our intuitions are only accurate in domains where we have a lot of experience.38

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.26

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”1 Scott Adams

psychologists discovered that there are two routes to achievement: conformity and originality.4

Customers could order the frames alone without any financial commitment, and simply send them back if they didn’t like the feel or look. This would actually be less costly than free returns. If a customer bought the frames with lenses and then returned them, Warby Parker would lose a lot of money, as the lenses were unique to the customer.

You don’t have to be first to be an original, and the most successful originals don’t always arrive on schedule. They are fashionably late to the party.

Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.

After reading the research on idea selection, I recognized one of my limitations: I wasn’t a fellow creator in the domain, nor was I a customer.