The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb. at andrewchen
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The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb. at andrewchen
Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exc
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it remains impossible to predict which ideas will catch fire, and anyone who claims to have reliable insights into this is either deceiving you or deceiving themselves. Radical ideas may start off very rare, may be complex or hard to grasp, and are, almost by definition, not backed by those with the most prestige. Yet sometimes, they too spread.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build ... See more
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
My point in sharing all of this is that sometimes I feel like we get too caught up in the words, and forget to disregard them. Especially (in the context of this essay) as builders of new technology products.“How will I describe this to an investor, or at a dinner party with friends?”"What’s the one-liner that describes why this will be better?”“Wh... See more
Josh Miller • "Disregard the Words"
In a 2010 essay, Chris Dixon wrote, "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." Provocative. What he meant was that new technologies are often dismissed as toys because they undershoot user needs, and that that ones that make it out of toy phase and into the zeitgeist do so because they ride external forces.