Nobody wants your ideas
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A few weeks ago someone offered me a deal: “Kyle, I have an amazing idea, and I can tell you have the creativity to pull it off. I’ve been offered this same deal a hundred times. It always goes something like this:
In other words: “I’ll have the idea, you’ll do all the work, and we’ll split everything 50/50.” If you ask these people what the idea actually is, they get cagey. They’ll ask you to sign an NDA or pinky-promise not to steal it, as if they’re about to launch the next iPhone. I find that hilarious, because frankly, nobody wants your ideas. What people want is for you to solve their problems. Ideas can solve those problems, but only if someone takes those ideas and makes them real. An idea on its own is worth essentially nothing. Just to prove it, here are some amazing ideas that I will give you, absolutely free:
Those are all great ideas. Every one of them would profoundly change the world. The problem is, I don’t know how to make any of those ideas work. And until someone figures that out, they’re worthless. Ideas are the easy part. It’s the execution that’s hard. The real threat to your ideas isn’t someone else — it’s you. The real threat is not that your ideas will get stolen, but that they will sit on a shelf and crumble away to nothing because you never put in the hard work to bring those ideas to life. The world doesn’t want your ideas. It wants you to turn them into real things — businesses, books, products, poems, songs — that solve real problems for real people. That process is scary and vulnerable and full of obstacles. But it’s also the only way your ideas will ever make a real difference in the world. It’s the only way your ideas ever become worth anything. The danger isn’t “What if someone steals my idea?” -Kyle |
Kyle Scheele
One useful idea about creative leadership, once a week
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