Unfortunately, we’re mostly wrong.

When we say an idea is ‘good’, we actually mean it’s clever, or novel, or simple, or appealing. Or worse: on-brand(!) This is because we’ve become so obsessed with ‘ideas as currency’ that we’ve reduced them to stories: things to tell each other about.

We confuse good ideas with what are just ‘nice’ ideas. Nice ideas are things we like in that low-commitment, fuzzy kind of way, as they whizz past us and onto the pages of trend blogs.

A ‘good idea’ can only be deemed such in hindsight. Once it’s resulted in unquestionable value for the desired parties. In a commercial context, this means making money (directly or indirectly) for the organisation that funds it.

Ideas are good when they work.

Me and a couple of friends are about to release a Spotify app. It’s called Guilty Pledgers. It helps people throw guilty pleasures house parties and it lets their guests add songs to the playlist for donating to charity — to offset their music guilt.
I’ve been working on it for over a year, so I’d love to tell you it’s a good idea. But the truth is, for now, I just know it’s a nice idea. It’ll be a good idea if people use it to fundraise.

I realise that I’ve opened a can of worms. And out pop new conversations: execution, marketing, optimisation are all key to making a product a success. An ‘idea’ is just that: a thought. And all this is semantic cat-and-mouse.
But the general point remains: We’ve got really good at ideas, but we need to stop falling under their spell and placing a disproportionate amount of value on them. It’s time for our creative brains to mature and focus on real-world impact, rather than intellectual and emotional seduction. Because actually, ideas are the easy part.

Nothing is certain, now let’s build on that.

It can be paralysing, during the early stages of developing a product or service, if you find yourself with inter-dependant unknowns. E.g. The feature-set is dependent on partners, but the partners’ interest is dependant on the feature-set. Time spent working on one side feels wasteful without confirmation of the other.

A great way to avoid going in circles is to adopt the ‘straw man’ approach. You quickly create a complete model of how things could work whilst acknowledging that it will almost certainly change in many ways. Quick is important, to minimise waste – and impermanence bypasses disagreement.

This duality (tangible + temporary) is empowering. The former gives the team and partners something palpable to discuss quickly, exposing potential issues. The latter keeps all parties relaxed. You can even create several versions of these straw man scenarios to confront different eventualities. It’s a simple idea. Obvious in hindsight, but incredibly useful.

It turns out we may have been misusing the phrase ‘straw man’.
The straw man fallacy is when one person misrepresents another person’s view and then tears the false representation apart. In this context, the straw man is a dangerous phantom; the result of one person’s wrecklessness, and a smackdown that lacks credibility or usefulness. Thinking more about straw men, I’m reminded of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, who didn’t have a brain. If you’re made of straw, it would seem that popular mythology will call you out as lacking in intelligence and purpose. And if you’re part of a piglet trio, you’ll note that building your house out of straw is a pretty bad move too.

I can’t help that all these ill feelings toward straw are the result of an outdated belief system, where certainty, confidence and solidity are seen as strength and anything short as weakness. Heroes used to be those that offered clarity amidst the chaos, but that idealism is dying. A new respect is rising for those driven enough to ‘fail quickly’, roll with the punches and emerge victorious after a sweaty wriggle in the muck.

These are characteristics of the new entrepreneur and they run through the veins of the Lean movement. In the opening pages of Running Lean, author Ash Maurya suggests turning your Plan A (instinctive, initial idea) into a one-page business model in 20 minutes flat, and to start testing its contents straight away. It’s a nice example of the straw man at play. And in my mind, it’s a product-based extension of what Clay Shirky framed for us in Here Comes Everybody: that we’ve moved from an edit-then-publish world, to a publish-then-edit one. Make something quickly and start hammering it against a little reality. This is where straw can be the best material you have.

For the record, the Scarecrow turned out to be the “wisest man in all of Oz”, so perhaps an unassuming form can be an advantage. A small budget and a rough exterior can help ideas to develop quietly and quickly, offered a chance to breathe before they’re ‘solid’ enough to appear a threat to people capable of squashing them. If you’re scared of starting, or are worried about the implications of cementing an idea (or having others believe it’s cemented), then you should try the straw man approach. It’s so simple it shouldn’t really need a blog post. So why don’t more people do it?

**Update**
Isaac just sent me this relevant – and excellent – story about shitty first ideas. Worth a read :)

Say it with as few (key) strokes as possible. Make your point clear. Add a touch of personality. And everyone loves a penguin.

Urged on by my recent revelation that I can now code [!] (I’m building a responsive website at the moment) I thought it would be interesting to calculate exactly how many sets of 10,000 hours’ spare time we all have left. I.e. How many things you have time to become an expert at. Clearly, these are generalisations, but they should at the very least give you some confidence.

If you’re 30 years old, you have 55,296 spare hours left (you can become an expert in over five new things)
Even if you’re 50, you have 38,016 spare hours left (that’s nearly four new things you can master in your lifetime)

Here’s the maths (explained underneath in more detail):

I based this on the UK’s average life expectancy of 79.5 years, and a retirement age of 65.
‘Spare time’ was then calculated for pre-retirement and post-retirement years…

For pre-retirement years, I’ve based it on spending two hours per weekday and four hours per weekend day. Post-retirement, I based it on spending six hours a day for six days of the week. I realise this is a lot of time, but it requires some obsessiveness to really master things. I have allowed time for family and friends and for both pre- and post-retirement, I allowed 4 weeks’ off for holidays.

I haven’t taken into account illnesses. But these are just ballparks.

You can work out how many things you have time to become an expert in by replacing the y in the equation with your age:

No excuses. It’s not too late to learn. Go and master something new.

–
Update: James Pryor made a calculator :)

This places me, I imagine, among a large number of people that could be called ‘tech enthusiasts’, but not ‘techies’.

Lots of products out there *appear* to be aimed at people like me. But I’m finding that many of them are failing in the same way. Here are two examples:

Squarespace
I’m in the middle of building a new blog, using Squarespace. I picked it because it seemed to be a tool designed for people that want a lot of control over the design of their blog, but can’t code very well.
Annoyingly, though, it offers limited control over things, without tampering with the CSS. And once you do start tampering, you realise that there are lots of things you can’t affect without a Developer account (which you need to access the html). Which completely undermines the premium account you’re already paying for. Hence, with its range of templates, it is probably great for people who don’t care what their site looks like, specifically, as long as it looks nice.

Twine
I bought a Twine because it appeared to be aimed at people (again) that couldn’t code, but wanted to mess around with sensors. Again, it quickly transpired that you can’t do anything very interesting without coding. You can basically get the Twine to send an email, or a horribly formatted text message. Woo!
The more interesting opportunities (http requests) rely on some coding knowledge. And if you have that, you probably don’t need Twine at all.

In both these cases, I think the product is falling in the gap between two audiences. They’re too basic for people that can code – and too limited for novice coders. I guess my conclusion (if you can call it that) is that people are struggling to make things for this market. I think the aspiration exists to give the layman super-powers, but if you fail to do that, and fall in the gap, you’ve alienated everyone.

I suppose I better work on my coding. Et mon français, aussi.

Reposted from my Instagram feed.

I may have mentioned (quite a few times) that I just purchased a Nexus 4. Perhaps seduced by its shininess, and definitely provoked by a novel operating system, I’ve found myself exploring its features like a… well, like a nerd. And against my expectations, it’s the voice command that has got me most* excited.

The killer feature, for me, is the ability to tap the mic icon (it’s right there on the home screen!), say “note to self” and have an email sent to yourself with your subsequent note. I email myself maybe four times a day with reminders. Now I can do it with one tap. It also attaches a sound file of your dictation to the email. Is this a gimmick? Maybe. But I have been genuinely using it. And to be honest, it’s a silly over-simplification to call this the ‘killer feature’. It’s more symbolic of the joyful interactions that are peppered throughout the Nexus 4 experience.

*There are other features I love too, but this one needed a blog post. I know, because I had a reminder to write one ;)