There’s a myth in Silicon Valley culture, one which is really an American cultural myth, too — but we’ll get to that —which is weirdly idolized, recited like a sacred mantra, and used like a bludgeon: “ideas don’t matter!! Only execution does”. That is, ideas are a dime a dozen. Every starry eyed crackpot, every starving artist, every raving inventor has ideas — but it takes someone special, gifted in a singular way, to bring ideas to life.
What kind of person? Someone with blue-eyed masculine American values: self-reliance, cunning, shrewdness, muscular toughness, ruthlessness, someone who can crack the whip and fell the enemy, with not a shred of remorse or emotion. Those guys — those tough, brave men — are what there’s a shortage of the world.
Right? LOL. Wrong. Let’s think about it for a second. Forget for a moment that believing only what we “execute” matters ends up producing bullies who are man-children on the inside — after all, it also tells us that people, emotions, experiences, truths, and lives, not to mention democracy, society, and history, don’t matter. Forget for a moment if we don’t think ideas matter we’ll never read novesl, watch plays, or stare at art — and thus understand life, death, or ourselves. All that’s true, but we’ll come back to it.
Uber just reinvented the bus and the ambulance, in a techno-Dickensian reiteration of history. That’s what happens when you think ideas don’t matter — you end up not actually having any. And because you don’t have any, then you have to act like Uber — rebranding old ideas, and pushing bad ones, through clever tricks and games, in order to create the illusion of progress.How funny. How sad.
But it’s hardly just Uber. Facebook isn’t a new idea, either. The first thing they gave me at grad school was a (paper) facebook, and it proceeded to drive everyone wild with envy, misery, and rage — no surprise then that’s exactly what the digital one does on a mass scale. Shall I go on? Google is just a search algorithm, which is what librarians have run for centuries. Digitizing information is just updating the microfiche. Two hour deliveries aren’t an idea at all. And so on. These things aren’t “ideas” so much as they are tired and boring reiterations, posing as grand ideas. Can you remember the last time Silicon Valley had a genuinely good — a truly socially beneficial — idea? I can’t. Go ahead, though, and if you think I’m being harsh, by all means, name one.
Here’s my point.
If anything, at this phase in history, ideas matter more — way more — than execution. Should we believe in the silly myth that “ideas don’t matter! Only execution does!”, then not only do we leave ourselves at the mercy of man-child macho-men like [insert tech CEO] — worse, we flunk the great test of this age in history.
Everything’s broken, friends. What we really needs are ideas for rebuilding the great broken systems that lie in ruins around us. Healthcare systems, educational systems, financial systems, social systems, environmental systems, energy systems.
Ideas of a special kind are what is needed to reinvent them. Big I Ideas. Idea have never mattered more — in fact, today, they matter so much, that the challenge is having the biggest, trust, and most transformative ones that we can. Huge ones. World-shaking ones. Life-changing ones. Let me explain what I mean.
To read the rest of this article, please visit: The Difference Between Big Ideas and Little Ideas
