Volker on Nostr: Let me expand this a little bit. An idea is something that pops up in your head, ...
Let me expand this a little bit. An idea is something that pops up in your head, sometimes out of the blue, sometimes after long pondering about a subject, sometimes after interacting with sources of information, like reading, talking to peers, etc.
So now you have an idea: "Peer-to-peer cash without central authority", "flying cars", "a smart phone with no buttons", "an electric car", etc.
To make any of those, let's call them high-level ideas, happen, you will need to come up with a gigantic tree of lower-level ideas, starting with the initial level. Let's use electric cars for an example. Here's a small part of the first level of secondary problems, for which you need you need to come up with ideas, to implement your initial idea:
- solve battery technology
- get battery suppliers for mass production
- design electric motor that withstands road vibration etc.
- research lightweight materials
- find ways to optimize car frame to make use of batteries as load bearing parts
- find target addressable market
- get funded
- find engineering skills
- motivate workers
- … … … … … (a few dozen more)
And you also need meta-ideas like project planning, HR rules, what type of company structure would be best, etc.
Now for EACH of the sub-problems, and meta-problems, and the ideas to solve them, you need to solve another few dozen sub-sub-problems, each of which require ideas.
This goes down many, many layers, and you'll end up with requiring probably a few million ideas. In the comparatively *extremely* easy case of a pure software product, each line of code represents an idea, because you need to have an idea how to formulate the code such that it actually does what you want it to do.
Now look what we have:
YOUR GREAT IDEA ABOUT FLYING CARS - 1 idea
The execution of producing all the lower level ideas, and stringing them all together so that a product comes to fruition - 10 million
And that is why your great fabulous idea is worthless. The execution is ~10 million times more work and value
So now you have an idea: "Peer-to-peer cash without central authority", "flying cars", "a smart phone with no buttons", "an electric car", etc.
To make any of those, let's call them high-level ideas, happen, you will need to come up with a gigantic tree of lower-level ideas, starting with the initial level. Let's use electric cars for an example. Here's a small part of the first level of secondary problems, for which you need you need to come up with ideas, to implement your initial idea:
- solve battery technology
- get battery suppliers for mass production
- design electric motor that withstands road vibration etc.
- research lightweight materials
- find ways to optimize car frame to make use of batteries as load bearing parts
- find target addressable market
- get funded
- find engineering skills
- motivate workers
- … … … … … (a few dozen more)
And you also need meta-ideas like project planning, HR rules, what type of company structure would be best, etc.
Now for EACH of the sub-problems, and meta-problems, and the ideas to solve them, you need to solve another few dozen sub-sub-problems, each of which require ideas.
This goes down many, many layers, and you'll end up with requiring probably a few million ideas. In the comparatively *extremely* easy case of a pure software product, each line of code represents an idea, because you need to have an idea how to formulate the code such that it actually does what you want it to do.
Now look what we have:
YOUR GREAT IDEA ABOUT FLYING CARS - 1 idea
The execution of producing all the lower level ideas, and stringing them all together so that a product comes to fruition - 10 million
And that is why your great fabulous idea is worthless. The execution is ~10 million times more work and value