No such thing as a good idea
Again and again I see companies, leaders think that communicating this great vision will make people follow it. It never works.
They are still surprised that something clearly communicated on a Town Hall makes people ask questions afterwards or was totally misunderstood. They forget that each word carries a personal story behind it.
Moreover, they delegate those ideas without getting their hands dirty in the process to provide guidence, find nuances and work through them. They underestimate the effort and overestimate the results.
I sometimes was guilty of that too. Historically, I underestimated how much work is needed to make an idea flourish or just get it out. How much brain power it takes to make trade offs, to perservere, pivot, work through self-doubts etc. How much time it takes people to understand what are you actually offering them. Whether that was building a product, a service or a community.
Already in my life I heard so many ideas and stories that never even touched paper or a sketch app (mine included) that I couldn’t even count them all.
It’s reassuring to know there are no good ideas, especially in the beginning. Similarly as with writing, we just need to get it out from our heads onto a canvas. Without initial judgement and with compassion towards ourselves, starting to polish, paint over it, tweak, rest, revisit, repeat 🖼️
You can find the Steve Jobs talk to which Marc is referring below:
“After I left John Scully got a very serious disease, and this disease other people get it too. It’s thinking that a really good idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people ‘here’s this great idea’ (…) - the problem with it is the tremendous amount of craftmanship in between a great idea and great product. When you evolve this idea it changes and grows. It never comes out lik it starts because you learn a lot more when you get into subtleties of it.”