Ideas are fragile, we should nurture them better
I often wonder how many great inventions, businesses, creations don’t exist because someone shot down the idea in it’s early conception.
Ideas are fragile, especially when they are held by people who have never done what they’re about to do before.
Because an idea is just energy. There is nothing tangible yet to make the idea a reality. All there is, is the beliefs of the beholder and their ability to generate more energy to turn the idea into something more.
In this fragile state, even one negative experience is enough to kill the dream and squash something that might have had the potential to be great.
To give this some perspective, it’s like turning up to school and on your first day your teacher or class mates telling you that you’re stupid. If you’re parents had never gone to school and you had no one to tell you that you weren’t, then your chances of succeeding would be pretty small.
People who have been in business for a while often forget how fragile people are in the early stages. So I thought I would offer up a few tips on how to give advice that drive constructive conversations and don’t kill the energy behind an idea:
- Leave the idea alone — don’t challenge it as a bad idea. Don’t ever say that it’s not going to work, because you just don’t know. The best people in the world when it comes to picking great ideas openly admit that they get it wrong, so what makes you think you’ve got it right. Don’t murder an idea. But by all means help to fast track a natural death by helping the creator to think about the right things, which brings me to the next point.
- Ask questions to help the person think about the important things when it comes to their idea. E.g. why do they care about this idea, what problem are they solving, who are their early adopters, what validation have they done etc.
- Talk about the things that you’ve seen work, or problems that you’ve seen other founders have because of x,y,z. Give examples of similar companies that have either succeeded or failed, so they can use them as a reference of what/what not to do.
- Admit when you don’t know the answer to something, or when you have no reference experience to base your judgement on, and put them in touch with someone who does.
- You want them to leave your conversation feeling more certain and confident that when they came into it — it doesn’t have to be more certain that the idea will work, just more certain around what the next steps are that they need to take to figure this out. I try to help founders leave with three things to focus on to keep it simple.
So please, never shoot down an idea. It’s not the idea itself that is important. Ideas morph and change so rapidly that they seldom ever end up as they started out. The important component is the beliefs of the founder and the energy that is necessary to create something out of nothing. Help to foster the momentum that’s needed to overcome the fears and uncertainties of first time founders. Let the pinball out of the holder and then help to navigate the trajectory. Otherwise it will never launch.
