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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

There are no million dollar ideas.

There are only difficult decade-long slogs through the hard work of building a company, which may or may not one day yield a million dollars.

Take spacex for example, which started like this and 20 years later is aiming for Mars

https://www.starletters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/maria...

Or Amazon, which started like this and took a long long time to become one of the biggest companies in the world

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7p9n1j/photo_of_jeff_...

But most people don't want to do the work so they look for million dollar ideas.

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As usual the truth is somewhat more nuanced. There definitely are million dollar ideas, and there's a lot of bad ideas that sound like they could be million dollar ideas, but which don't work in practice, no matter how much work you put into it.

However, coming up with ideas is far, far easier than executing on them. If you're in a situation where you can't generate ideas, I would recommend reading/watching various advice on the subject in the YC library and elsewhere, to try and get closer to the right mindset to be open to opportunities. Then pay attention to all the little things you ignore day to day. Every time you find yourself getting frustrated with a company or process, that could be an opportunity in disguise. It's also beneficial to broaden your work experience. Go work in a different field or a field at an intersection with yours and pay attention.

Be Mindful of The Living Force as you go through life :)

> However, coming up with ideas is far, far easier than executing on them.

There was an article [0] shared here last month that I found useful for weighing the relative importance of ideas vs execution.

IMO, there are many many million-dollar-ideas (million with an m, not billion) out there, that are enough to make a bootstrap startup out of.

Many people see these ideas, but don't develop them because the problems are "body-building hard" instead of "ideas hard". Working 9-5 at $BIG_CO is neither kind of hard most of the time, and most people prefer that.

[0]: https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/2017/05/26/hard-is-not-def...

> "body-building hard"

'Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.' - Ronnie Coleman

This is not really relevant, but I found body building made me a better programmer.

I'm not sure if it's just healthy body healthy mind, or building up discipline, or something else.

I'm not much of a body builder compared to most, mind you, but I keep at it.

> I'm not much of a body builder compared to most, mind you, but I keep at it.

Mind sharing how you are able to sustain the habit?

I currently jog fairly consistently but only on week days. I’m able to jog for ~25 mins 3 to 5 times a week and make it a point to rest on weekends.

I got a boxed set of portable weights just as the lock down was about to be enacted but have not been able to lift regularly. Now, it takes an enormous amount of mental energy to get myself to lift even on weekends that I’ve simply abandoned the weights.

Not the person you've replied to, but I've found that the observation of consistent progress (in terms of the weights you're capable of lifting, etc) is a big hook.

I haven't lifted in a while, but I've done marathon training before and the hook is quite related. Each week, if you push yourself hard enough, you will make more or less linear progress.

Just like running, the first 2-3 weeks of regular lifting are a big slog to get through, but then your body starts learning/adapting, you start demonstrably and rapidly improving, and it becomes fun.

I agree somewhat but there are still differences between the 2 workouts. I guess it boils down to the different muscle types that are recruited for each workout: slow-twitch muscles for jogging versus fast-twitch muscles for weightlifting.

Linear progress is easy to track with runs when you push yourself hard enough as you say, but not so much with weights because it comes with it’s own tending. For instance, to really see results rapidly, your diet has to change such that you are getting certain amounts of protein and other nutrients to build muscle mass.

I have tried to copy the discipline I’ve inculcated from running regularly for weightlifting, but I’m not able to sustain it because in addition to it using up fast-twitch muscles, it also comes with a change in dietary habits that go with that kind of workout.

These are totally fair points. I'd only quibble a bit that diet can be a big limiter for linear progress in running, depending on the kind of running you're doing.

At the time I was training, I was aiming for a marathon time that qualifies you for the Boston Marathon, as an example. (that's much more about muscle development than other forms of running). You can't consistently run a sub-7:00 mile for more than 3 miles without having a pretty regimented diet.

If you don't increase your protein intake dramatically, you'll get injuries while pushing for that pace, and if you can't push, you will plateau.

But you're right that you can go pretty far (maybe a month) without changing your diet in running training, depending on where you're starting from.

I think it's about creating habits. I struggled to workout at home during the lockdown, and slid backwards a lot. When I have the gym available, I just go 5 times a week at the same hour every day. I don't have to think about it. I don't take my phone with me, so I have an hour at the gym with nothing else to do but do my exercises. So my advice to you is set a time on the weekends when you're going to workout, and make sure you do that every weekend without fail, pretty soon it'll just be another thing you do, like brushing your teeth.

It's a little awkward now because I have to schedule an appointment for the gym and I can only get access 3 times a week, and it's the building gym so there isn't a huge variety of equipment, but I'm making do.

Thanks for the tips!

God willing, I’ll try out the same-time same-days tip this weekend and see if I can sustain it for a month. If I can’t make it work, I’ll trial the gym membership tip.

Thanks!

I agree very much with this idea. I'm working on bootstrapping a body building hard company at the moment.

I'm not exactly sure how it will play out, and it sure isn't easy. But I'm chipping away at it day after day and I'm confident I can make a living at it.

I'm not discounting moonshot business ideas. I'm saying there's a bunch of capable people out there that may not have any idea what exactly to build. And I'm saying people like that could benefit from active discussion on ideas of what to build, and people that already have ideas of what to build would benefit from discussing their startup idea & business plan with others prior to diving in head first.

I'm basically saying mix wisdom of the crowd with the startup-idea generation process.

Quite sincerely, I'm convinced YC and other VCs don't do this because they've observed that ideas truly don't matter very much. And if you can't even come up with an idea what hope do you have of finishing the work, why not become an employee (which is fine)?

What matters is the journey and how you react to the multiple problems along the way (99% of people give up too early, too much grit is required). Usually by the end of that journey your initial idea has changed beyond recognition, even if there are some common elements between the idea and the endpoint.

To come up with some examples:

Apple: Computers for everyone -> Phones for everyone

Amazon: Buy books online -> Logistics, Free Delivery + Cloud Compute

Airbnb: Airbeds in living rooms -> Online bookings

SpaceX: Greenhouse on Mars -> Reusable rockets

Very few ideas survive contact with reality unscathed.

if ideas don't matter, explain Uber and the dozens of copy cat apps that launched right after all over the world. Why didn't they launch before Uber was even thought of by the founder?

I agree with you I also have been looking for place where good ideas are shared and discussed. Couldn't find any except the usual subreddits where posts do occaisionally come by discussing trends, ideas etc. A good idea is rare. I don't follow the belief of ideas are a dime a dozen. If that where the case why was Uber the first company to innovate in the taxi space and why suddenly just after it launched like 20 different companies launched everywhere in the world doing exactly the same.

You don't even need an idea to reliably make a million dollars. Just get a moderately well paying job and save money.

A billion dollars, on the other hand...

It's very hard for people to be disciplined about not increasing their lifestyle when doing this in order to actually save enough. But it's a nearly 100% sure-fire way to achieve that goal.

Or make a lucky leveraged bet on the stock market.

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