Don't love your idea. Hate it. | Hacker News Reader

Don't love your idea. Hate it.

aarvay.in

24 pointsAarvay9 comments

I think this is a great point. Hate is a strong word, I'm not sure I would advise hating your idea. You've got to love what you're doing, right? But love the process, not the idea.

What I think may be best is to be endlessly curious about whether you should love or hate your idea. I think that will lead to a search for whether others love or hate the idea, which is the way to validate it.

Joel, I agree. Hate is a strong word. I just used it so that people get what I am trying to tell. I think you have a great thought here. It makes much sense :)

Hate is not the right word. In fact '$verb it' isn't the right phrase. Rather, the phrase should be: think of your idea as an adversary, a villain or arch enemy that you need to defeat. That you need to keep working at to conquer. You don't love or hate arch enemies, but because they exist and cause [you] much distress, you'll end up looking like a hero when you do defeat it. Walking away is not an option. Either you win, and defeat the villain, or you die (or, analogously, rather learn from your mistakes) because if you walk away, the villain will never stop [haunting your mind with what-ifs]. Emotion is not an option, you have to be Batman; stoic, rational, determined.

* disclaimer, sometimes I use very strange metaphors.

It's not the right the word. Agreed. But I never said give up. The whole point was to tell, don't have any personal attachment with ideas. I used that word to make people understand what I am trying to say :)

It's a delicate balance. You need to be be emotionally detached enough to not let your decisions be affected. However, you also need to know how to be passionate about your project for any potential investors or colleagues to drive the project to succeed.

I would definitely agree that to progress with any endeavor -- entrepreneurial or creative -- requires critical analysis of your work and yourself. If you are not focusing on your flaws, then you are likely skipping steps necessary for improvement.

Though, I often find myself at the opposite end of this spectrum. I tend to focus foremost on the flaws in my work, and because of this, I do hate much of my own work and I have dissuaded myself from any further attempts. I would say a certain degree of persistence is equally as important as maintaining a critical point of view.

I like this idea. Sometimes we start thinking our idea is so wonderful that we start disregarding the obvious problems associated with it.

William Faulkner said: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings."

He also said "Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written."

Sounds like a driven person to me!

I completely agree with what this article is saying. A lot of people pickup an idea, run for a while...and beat it to death while it continues to fail. The term "Fail fast" has been over stated a bit recently, but at the same time there's a lot in it...if something isn't working or you cant get what you wanted out of trying to validate it, move on.

Lots of people who have been in failed start-ups have gone on to be massive successes...if they didn't have the ability to recognize their success and pickup something new, they would have never made it. Failure is just another word for learning...so yep, if it doesn't work hate it and start something that you love.

The tricky part is knowing when to hate it, to borrow from the quote book again...

"The problem with the Internet startup craze isn't that too many people are starting companies; it's that too many people aren't sticking with it. "

- Steve jobs

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