Never Underestimate Your First Idea — Thoughts
I was recently listening to an interview on Masters of Scale with Ev Williams. He is the guy who co-founded Blogger, Twitter, and Medium. The episode has many interesting ideas. I will share here, briefly, some thoughts about it.
As mentioned in the podcast, it all started when he read an article in Wired magazine about connecting brains and the instant publishing of text and ideas. He believed that the value was in the network, not in the software. But programming was the gate for him to create the idea.
The problem was that there weren’t as many people using the internet as there are today. It was different back in the late 80s. If you couldn’t code, you couldn’t even start. It needed to be easy to use, so he created a video on a VHS tape to teach non-tech users how to use the internet. That was an entirely unusual approach to solving such a problem at that time.
Then he moved to Silicon Valley, where he worked for O’Reilly Media to write technical books for the first generation of web engineers. At that time, he started a weblog at evhead.com which is currently redirecting to medium.com. However, if you are interested, you can look into it at archive.
Then the idea evolved, so he co-founded Blogger, Twitter, and Medium. Also, it was so exciting to see the development of ideas grow his story. That helped online publishing to form the internet we have today.
The main idea is ‘Don’t underestimate your first ideas.’ First ambitions. First desires. You have to go back to them. Review them. Develop them. Try to remember where you wanted to get to when you were a child or when you started your career. What were the things you were obsessed with? Because most probably these are the things that will make you satisfied after all. Maybe they are who you are. So who knows with being more yourself, where that could lead you?
I can relate to this. One of the first activities I liked when I was a child was writing. Of course, it was a simple level of writing, but I liked it. However, when I grew up, I also wanted to pursue a career in software engineering. But somehow that wasn’t enough for me. Thinking about pursuing a career in writing stayed. And just the idea of choosing between both was painful. But then I thought… maybe I don’t have to choose. There is a way to combine them, to find a middle ground.
Maybe this blog is just the place to do so.
