Over the recent years there has been a prevailing belief in the startup world that the idea itself is worth nothing while execution is everything. Such thinking lives in the heads of investors, angels and VCs alike and funny enough even founders.
Former tend to prioritize the importance of a start-up team over the validity of the idea itself. The latter in an attempt to play ball quite often concentrate on secondary things like bringing onboard a team of experts with the sole purpose to impress investors, rather than putting the priority on primary things, that is refining the idea itself.
Though there can be some merit in the statement about the idea versus execution with execution indeed being an important part of any business, however, such thinking is not only detrimental for the societal progress and development but in our opinion it cannot be farther from the reality. Mere look at some start-up statistics will tell us that 9 out of 10 start-ups fail. But do they all fail because their execution really sucked? As a matter of fact, no. Majority of start-ups fail because no one needed their products in the first place. That is their idea that triggers all further work is really not that good.
Idea is the foundation and structure of any creation.
Just like in construction if your foundation and structure are weak your house sooner or later will collapse. If they are strong and sound you have a chance to survive an earthquake. The same goes for your start-up. If your idea is really good and brilliant, you have stronger chance for your business to survive. If you are more concerned with external appearances but the foundation and structure are weak, your business will collapse at the slightest wind.
To better demonstrate this opinion, let’s have a look at a movie industry for an analogy. There are plenty of Hollywood movies with A-list stars playing there, however not all of them make it to blockbusters or plainly speaking can even be considered good enough to be worth another watch and to be called anything but mediocre. At the same time movie industry gets shaken from time-to time by the new comers and “no namers” that make it to the movie Olympus and get the well-deserved spectators’ praise and accolades. So what makes A-list star movies fail and the unknown dark horses really succeed? In a movie everything starts with a screen-play, this is the plot of the story that will be performed and played by the actors. If it is good you can consider your job half done, if it is not, then even with titanic efforts from the production team it will be very unlikely worth it.
Just the same goes for the start-up world. Screenplay is nothing but your idea. Production is the execution efforts you put to make your idea a reality. Start with your idea first. Is it really worth implementing? Are you doing it for money, fame or because your idea is indeed so genuinely good that it deserves to live? And most importantly what sets a great idea apart from a mediocre one? To answer this question we need to understand how human creativity works.
Creativity is the highest level of human intellect. In our proprietary system of human braining we call it intellectual potential.
It is a fundamentally wrong belief that everyone’s creative potential is the same, because everyone’s braining is different and individual. Creativity is not something that can be forced upon you or really taught. Yes, there are multiple systems, frameworks and programs aiming at improving creative potential of a human being, however, how many of those that completed such programs are able to create a non-existent before concepts or products and make a real break-through? A brief look at the music industry will help us to grasp how creativity really works. Imagine you want to compose a new music piece. To do this you can take, for example, one of Mozart’s works and start by rearranging some of its parts and changing their pitch and length. Can such creation be considered a new music piece and most importantly will it be really good? The truth is that there is only one way to compose music and that is to hear it in your head first.
A belief that creativity can be structured and described in a method is fundamentally wrong.
Those who state so have very vague understanding of how human brain works. Brain is by far the most complicated organ in the human body. Millions of processes happen in it every second, both physical and chemical. Fundamental misconception about creativity lies in the false understanding of what determines human thinking. In a very simplified way we can say that creativity along with human thinking originates in the associative center of cerebral cortex which developed from olfactory brain analyzer. Processes happening in the associative cerebral cortex and olfactory brain analyzer are of fundamentally different nature to the ones happening in visual and auditory brain analyzers. Thus it really doesn’t matter how many songs we listen to or paintings we look at, neither of these processes and their frequencies can determine our ability to create our own music piece or draw a painting.
There are different levels of creativity. Going back to music example, some will be able to compose only a couple of notes in their brain, while others will be able to compose sheet music for the whole orchestra. Break-through creativity though remains the resort of the real genius, those who can see and imagine the unseen and create something that has never been created before. How many ideas of the 21st century can you name that really redefined the way we live? How many breakthrough technologies of the 21st century can you name that were not originating in the 60th-70th of the twentieth century? Have we as humans really achieved the maximum of our creative potential? We truly hope that not.
But one thing remains true though, for the creative genius to come out priorities need to be set right, start with the idea, because all the rest is truly secondary.
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