In my line of work I hear a lot of ideas. Occasionally I have them myself. Of these ideas, some are genuinely good (those ones are not normally mine), most are pedestrian and some are breathtakingly bad.
Almost every single person that discusses a business idea with me, insists I swear to absolute secrecy lest some one else hear about it and steal their chance for fame, fortune and a yacht in the Caribbean. This is occasionally followed with some kind of threat or plea against stealing it myself.
People are very proud of their ideas, they are the product of the most intensely personal process we possess as humans. Creativity is what separates homo sapiens from most every other branch of the animal kingdom.
The less a person shares their ideas, the more precious they tend to be about the ones they do, good bad or otherwise. Let me get one thing out of the way right now, everyone has bad ideas. In a memorial speech for Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive shows a side of Steve not usually public.
Steve used to say to me – and he used to say this a lot – “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”
And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.
And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
Steve Jobs had dreadful ideas. In order to find and nurture the fragile, easily missed or squished brilliant ideas, he shared them all, dreadful or otherwise. Creativity is akin to a muscle, the more you flex it, the stronger it becomes. And just like exercise, if you do it right, some times it hurts the next day.
Like love, petunias and humans, ideas can not survive in a vacuum. There are many reason people don’t share ideas, but at the heart of all of them is fear. Fear of feeling stupid, fear of looking stupid, fear of the idea being stolen, fear that some one else could do it / think it / build it better.
If Steve Jobs wasn’t afraid to look dopey when he had a truly dreadful idea, I’m certainly not going to worry that my idea is a little half baked. Contrary to popular belief, it’s also very hard to get people to steal your idea. Eric Ries puts it best:
“If you have one idea, you probably have more than one idea. Take your second best idea, one you probably will never execute, and find the perfect company to implement the idea, find the right product manager at that company to implement it, and try your hardest to get him to steal your idea!”
When I (stupidly) asked Dave King how to become a great artist, his simple advice become a mantra.
To become amazing, you need to get the first 10,000 shit drawings out of your system.
I’ve since discovered this applies to blog posts (please pardon the next 9,999 odd posts), photography, guitar, dancing, martial arts and basically everything else harder than walking. Great ideas are absolutely no exception to this rule. Somewhere along the journey to 10,000 you’ll forget that you were aiming for a number in the first place and just concentrate on getting better every single time, this is the point people really start to notice you might be something special.
Now I don’t care what type of ideas you have, business ideas, musical ideas, craft ideas, tasty chocolate cake ideas, every single kind of idea is better shared. Do us a little common sense though, for instance the one about the camel and the tire tube, please keep that one to yourself.
The only way to start having good ideas is to get the shit ones out in the open. Choose people you trust enough to give you an honest opinion then share away. Share, share, share. Not only will you have some of the best conversations of your life, the ideas that make it past first contact with another human will be the ones worth pursuing, mental survival of the fittest if you will.
This is liberating. No longer will you feel the hefty burden of keeping so many amazing ideas to yourself, you’ll never need to think about the really dopey ones again, you can now concentrate on coming up with the next idea that may just change the world.