great ideas are born out of many bad ideas.

you have to pick 10 ideas that all seem awful, and one of them might just be great.

the problem is that the best ideas often come in disguise. instead of realizing that you’ve come up with 1 ok idea, 8 bad ideas, and 1 great idea — you think you have 1 ok idea + 9 bad ones.

thus the trickiest part about bad ideas is self-censorship. it’s not easy to even write them down, let alone show, discuss, or implement them.

the most difficult part of brainstorming is pretending there are no stupid ideas.

— overheard on twitter

the reason for that is that we are taught to judge and to be afraid of judgment from an early age. combine that with the human inclination to save effort, and you have a recipe for never doing anything interesting.

a remedy for that is practice and attitude. make it a habit to come up with lots of ideas, and don’t label them as “bad”. resourcefulness is a muscle, it builds up over time.

just have many ideas.

intuition without data is whatever cognitive bias fits the situation — it feels like a hunch that shouldn’t be ignored. if I don’t understand the gibberish presidential candidates say, I’ll just choose the one who looks less crooked.

data without vision is myopia — it makes sure you’ll only get to a local maximum. you know what to do to climb a tree, but is it the right tree at all?

so, intuition or data is a false choice. good decisions require both. isolating one component is an easy shortcut, while having a holistic vision — constantly tested and refined by accurate data — feels like hard work.

you can only trust hard work.

10 years ago I walked into the kitchen where my team was having lunch. they had a casual discussion of superhuman abilities as I joined them.

somebody asked what my most desired ability was. without missing a heartbeat, I said “learn 10 times faster”. my job as CEO required me to never stop learning, I explained.

when I bootstrapped my software product company a few years before that, the word “startup” was not even a thing in our part of the world. websites were still best built from scratch using HTML templates and PHP, best sources of knowledge were bloated paper books, and sure as hell I couldn’t hire professionals for any role.

my strategy was to find promising novices, figure out what their job was, and hope they’d grow to take control. so, before I could teach anyone anything, I had to half-decently know how to do it myself.

suddenly I found myself learning a myriad of things: from leading a team of developers, to web design, to UI, to copywriting and marketing, to SEO, and to sales. all while drawing shitty product logo images using a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop.

not a small task for a recent computer science graduate. no wonder it always felt like disaster and I thought I’d never figure out all the bells and whistles of running a small software company. turned out, it was only 10% about software.

somehow we pulled through. those first few years cemented one thing in my mind: there was always something to learn. I was determined to learn whatever it takes, even though giving it 12 hours a day, 6 days a week never seemed remotely enough.

—

but then things started shifting. technology change was ever accelerating, strong competition was emerging, and customer needs were becoming more and more sophisticated. one envisioned path arrived at a crossroads of a dozen paths.

before, I knew exactly what to learn, but now I was puzzled. which way to go? what stack of critical knowledge to pursue? eventually, paths were taken, opportunities chosen, mistakes made, and lessons learned. nonetheless, the need to choose never went away after that.

so, if I was asked the same question today, my answer would be “know what to learn”. I can live with the same, human pace of learning if I have the superhuman ability to know what’s important.

even if you are not a teacher, be a teacher. share your ideas. rejoice in what you learn and spray it.

— Tim Minchin

I was not a very good teacher naturally, but I managed to vastly improve just because I took pleasure in teaching. it was unexpected — but it played a major role in building my team.