"Sensible" is Not the Best Metric for Your Ideas

"The natural tendency is to recoil from these ideas, because everything inherent to that kind of creativity requires breaking away from the norm, going against the grain, and leaning into risk and fear."

Wet the clay sculpture. Smear black seeds all over it. Watch them grow into a green fur all over the sculpture. What a stupid idea.

Half a million Chia Pets are sold each year.

Fling birds at pigs. If that’s not the stupidest idea for a game ever I don’t know stupid.

In 2011 Rovio confirmed a profit of $106 million.

Western Union didn’t want to buy Bell’s invention, the telephone, because it had no value.

Financial experts called Henry Ford’s invention a fad.

Fired from the newspaper where he worked because he lacked imagination, Walt Disney turned to other things.

Elvis Presley was asked to leave the Grand Ole Opry after a single performance because he was “goin’ nowhere.”

The so-called experts said nobody would want to listen to digital music files they said couldn’t be sold and watch homemade television shows or have video chats with people on the other side of the world, all considered impossibly stupid ideas even after they were proven feasible.

It’s a well-kept secret in modern business that the purpose of analysis is to find a way to say “no” to things. In their seminal In Search of Excellence Tom Peters and Bob Waterson pointed out that businesses which left slack for experiments, dumb ideas that might not pan out, were the ones who struck gold with strokes of genius.

As Richard Branson says, protect the downside. But your stupid ideas might be the best ideas you’ve ever had.

It’s easy to assume that the brilliant ideas which have shaped the world we live in were recognized by both the creators and their peers, hailed as genius from day one.

I don’t know of a single case where that’s true.

Before things are considered normal, they’re new. And before they’re new, they’re just stupid.

The Stupid Loop

"[I]f your stupid project becomes successful, it will likely become accepted, then considered smart, and then standardized, and eventually, normal."

Remember Howard Aiken’s comment? “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore used Rogers’ Distribution Curve to teach us that between early adopters and the general masses lay a chasm it was difficult, sometimes impossible to cross. Even early adopters need education to accept something radically new.

Norton points out the risks of our stupid ideas becoming normal: if we get comfortable with normal, stop innovating, starting stupid stuff, we make ourselves irrelevant.

I’m focusing on the pattern itself, what he calls the Stupid Loop: from stupid to smart to normal.

Because every brilliant idea in the world has gone through the same loop.

When you can’t let go of an idea, when you lose sleep over it, when you simply cannot not do it, that stupid idea has every chance of becoming tomorrow’s normal.

Your willingness to pay the price in blood, sweat, and tears will prove to yourself and to others that maybe it’s not so stupid after all.

Service is the Greatest Evidence of Resolve

"[S]erving others is powerful evidence to the ones we serve of our resolve."

A large section of the book explains the acronym START: Serve, Thank, Ask, Receive, Trust. Like Stephen M. R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust, each is worthy of an entire book.

I’ve long said that generosity is your greatest marketing tool. Norton’s explanation is that when we serve unselfishly we win in multiple ways:

• Make strategic connections

• Overcome the Time/Education/Money gap

• Establish credibility and earn trust

• Gain experience

• Low-risk learning

Giving without an agenda connects you with others in a visceral manner not possible through staid business efforts. It’s the basis of Zig Ziglar’s claim that you can have everything you want if you help enough other people have what they want.