Where do good ideas come from?

Look at the pile of bad ideas. Ideas are in the ether. Anyone can come up with an idea. It’s the execution gap that makes an idea valuable.

I think back to the early days of apps. A decade or more later, the conversation shifts to an excellent idea for a podcast. You’re too late, and most likely with the wrong intent. The mindset shouldn’t be extracted; instead, what can I contribute?

Since we are walking memory lane, it is worth remembering that Google wasn’t the first search engine. Instagram wasn’t a photo-sharing app at first either. Novelty isn’t the answer to great ideas. Remixing, blending, refining, reimagining, and finding something that rhymes…can be more valuable than being first. Version 1.0 rarely works better than the tenth iteration.

Ideas need to grow, too. They need time to see if they can stick to the culture. Driving on the right side of the road wasn’t just a given when the first cars were rolled out.

Good ideas can start by intersecting your point of view with an idea and seeing it in a different light and perspective that no one else can see. Slack, after all, was a gaming platform until they realized that internal communication was a good idea to go market with.

You may be sitting on a good idea, but it may be just another bad one. We can be sitting around a long time waiting for eurika. But getting action-oriented tends to have eureka moments built into them.