The billion dollar genius ego dilemma

THE FALLACY OF THE GREAT IDEA

"The problem with the great idea is that it concentrates the mind on the idea itself. Unless the idea is executed efficiently, and with panache and originality, then it doesn't matter how great the idea is, the enterprise will fail.

If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled at executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Seek them out and make them work. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all in this regard.

On the other hand, if you spend your days thinking up and developing in your mind this great idea or that, you are unlikely to get rich. Although you are likely to make many others rich. Ideas don't make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does."

-Felix Dennis ($400+M net worth)

http://sivers.org/book/HowToGetRich

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1084093.ece?pri...

Via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680578

I don't believe in the billion dollar idea. I believe in the million dollar idea and then iterating :)

I always like to compare holy grail problems to the biggest of them all: alchemy. For hundreds of years, many very smart people thought they were on the verge of becoming richer than kings but came up with bupkus until it was discovered that the means by which lead can be turned into gold involves nuclear reactions.

It has been done. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation

But what matters is the field from which you are approaching a problem. Tabletop chemistry was not enough. You needed nuclear physics. Maybe logic is not enough for AI. Maybe you need psychology, or some other field.

In any event, great ideas don't care about probability. Google was a great idea, came in 1998, and kicked ass.

I've thought I've had billion-dollar ideas for eight years now. It's always something world-changing, but I've been wrong so many times that when I come up with a good idea I take it with a sense of humor.

There's always a small chance that they're not billion dollar genius' but are instead people who have had a pretty good idea at exactly the right time.

If the right time is just after a step forward step in some seemingly tangentially related field and just before everyone else spots the connection then it more about luck than genius.

Of course, this doesn't apply to people with ideas that are trivially easy to shoot down but won't listen :)