The Value of Ideas | Hacker News Reader

The Value of Ideas

stevepavlina.com

27 pointsgetp13 comments

Reading this message reminds me to be humble because I was an "idea guy" up until a few years ago. I even had a Great Big Idea that I wouldn't tell anybody about. My hacker friend wouldn't go in on a business with me and he wasn't tempted to build my site for $500, so I decided to learn how to build websites myself. Boy was I shocked and frustrated by just how much there is to learn. I started the process 2005 by learning where websites lived (I discovered servers) and have progressed from there.

Unfortunately the pressures of making a living slowed me down for a few years, but today I feel like I have a good perspective on what I know and what I need to know to build what I want to. People have started to "steal" my Big Idea in the intervening years, but that's okay because I've come up with new ones. I'm actually pleased that the process was so hard because I have learned so much and it has led me to attend graduate school in Computer Science this fall.

Anyways, this message is very personal to me. I have learned to admire those who are good implementers and to strive to be one myself.

Pavlina's site feels like one big informercial. Is there a term yet for blogs like that?

This is his sole steady source of income (the other being speaking engagements), so the marketing is understandable.

splog.

No, that's too harsh. Splog is automatically generated website with the help of blog CMS, while he actualy writes his own articles.

The guy was quite helpful in the past with articles like how to build a habit of geting up early etc., but later shifted his focus to maximize his own profit from the site.

He's got the same "classic archive" problem that anyone with a long blog archive has. Last time Pav mentioned it, he had written over 500 articles, so now he prob has 700+. His most successful articles are posted on the front, circulate around the internet, etc. But if you go back sequentially through his archives, maybe only 1/3 of them are good and 1/10 are great. But those stand out in memory of the "good old Steve Pavlina". Same for pg, raganwald, and Joel.

Pavlina's site feels like one big informercial

Not as good as this guy's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Trudeau

You guys are being kind of tough on his blog. I really only see one ad (though the motion is distracting).

I just spent some time reading through some of his other articles. The guy has some great ideas: freeing mental RAM, read a book a week, putting ideas into action, action days, making goals visible, etc. I just subscribed and am hopeful that his future posts will be as insightful as what I've just been reading.

he had some good stuff a long time ago but then it became hard to read when he started talking about psychic journeys into the unknown.

If good ideas are so worthless and easy to come up with, why are so many startups running around with really bad ideas?

because you don't really know an idea is good until you take a risk and test it... a lot of things we take for granted today seemed like 'bad ideas' before masses accepted them

I've been surprised to note that a large number of people I've met with bad ideas are following them because they lack the ambition or the ability to execute on their better ideas. So they go after a market that's too small to be worth addressing, because they can see how to get there, without realizing that no one knows exactly how to approach the huge markets. The only difference is that they're willing to try.

Of course, I've also met people who actually are going after big ideas that are bad because they are too big for a startup. Things that change the shape of the world...it takes a whole market to do that. So, maybe I'm just making up generalizations just like everybody else.

But the point about "Which would you rather build, your own ideas or someone elses?" is the most important. Every time a "business" or "ideas" or "product" guy starts talking about his awesome idea, and he just needs someone to implement it, he's showing himself to be so self-involved as to be intolerable to work with for most hackers--every hacker he talks to has his own "good" ideas, but the "idea" guy thinks he's got a monopoly.

That's all the article is saying, and I've been around startups long enough to know that it's generally true.

Because valuing an idea as "good" or "bad" is difficult and largely subjective?

His point maybe would've been clearer if he'd said something like "Coming up with workable/interesting/possible ideas is easy."

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