Tempt Lightning

“Over time, I’ve moved from thinking, ‘There’s no such thing as a bad idea,’ into, ‘Well, yeah, there are some bad ideas.’ And now, I am firmly convinced there’s no such thing as a good idea. Every idea is a bad idea. No idea performs the way you expect once you collide it with reality. And the more I learn, the more I believe that it’s true…” That’s another gem from Marc Randolf’s (co-founder of Netflix) fascinating conversation with Tim Ferriss.

I’ve mentioned that Randolf gives a masterclass on maximizing experimental return on investment (later in the interview), but the quote I’ve been pondering most is his notion that, “There’s no such thing as a good idea.” I think it’s quite true.

What does it mean that there’s no such thing as a good idea? Things always seem like great ideas in our heads, but how they play out in our minds is so far removed from reality so as to be a useless approximation of their actual merits. The only thing that proves whether an idea is any good is taking some kind of knowledge-creating action, which business folks are particularly reluctant to do… So the most important thing is to reduce the friction from having an idea to taking action, to increase the speed at which you “collide ideas with reality.”

This resonates with what my friends at PreHype have taught me: “We’re trying to get out of the ‘Is this a good idea?’ business altogether, and just run as many experiments as possible, because the reality is: things never go the way you think they’re going to go.”

Randolf continues, “…And what that (realization) has forced me to do is say, ‘I’ve got to stop thinking about things and I’ve got to just begin doing them, because that’s the only way I’m going to figure out whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea.’ And that’s hard for us, because people don’t like to fail.”

Experiments often start in the wrong direction. But in the course of experimenting with real customers, teams uncover a more profitable direction than they had imagined, but likely never would have imagined absent the momentum generated by experimentation. As they say, “It’s much easier to steer a ship that’s moving, even if it’s moving in the wrong direction.”

As was the case with Bill Bowerman in the early days of Nike, ideas tend to strike people who are in the habit of trying things out.

Lightning strikes the woodshop, so a commitment to experimentation is one of the best ways to tempt lightning.

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