The "execution is everything" mantra is tired hyperbole. Of course 'the idea' is worthless if it's nothing.
That's the whole point of the article. He is saying that in the context of an idea.
The Value of Ideas
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Re: The Value of Ideas
#42What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless?
The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable. Of course, that's false, as Adams says. Value is associated to scarcity. Easy-to-have ideas aren't valuable, simply because they're not scarce. An idea like the Ricci flow is valuable, because very few people are capable of having it.
Ditto the ideas behind deep algorithms. PageRank had value in large part because relatively few people had the depth of insight required to come up with it.
Come to think of it, the Turing machine was an idea that Turing invented to formalize Hilbert's intuitive notion of an effective computation. And I think that idea turned out to have some value.
Re: The Value of Ideas
#43Here's the world's worst opinion on movie making: here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic. Can anybody name even a single, solitary reason--even one --why the story of the Titanic could be considered anything other than a fantastic idea for a movie? The only thing I can come up with is "It's been done (successfully) too many times already", but that actually disproves the general assertion. I mean--it's up…
It's a romance story where everyone dies at the end.
What's the target demographic? Guys? No, too much romance. Girls? No, too SFX heavy and everyone dies.
Don't say James Cameron can't play to a crowd.
Re: The Value of Ideas
#44I'm not convinced that the idea/execution dichotomy works. Consider the steam engine of Thomas Newcomen. We may say that it was a triumph of execution. The earlier Savery engine failed commercially because it used steam pressure and early boilers and pipe work could not contain it. The idea of using atmospheric pressure to do work and leaving the steam circuit unpressurised was the key idea in the Newcomen or Atmospheric Engine. Since this idea was due to Denis Papin, who failed to exploit it, we may say that the idea was worthless and Thomas Newcomen's success was due to good execution of Papin's idea.
Here is a second idea which fills out the rest of this paragraph. In 1712 high pressure steam was one hundred years ahead of its time. Pipes would leak, boilers would burst. Papin's idea of using unpressurised steam, condensing it, and letting atmospheric pressure do the work is obviously stupid, but if you don't want to wait 100 years, it is the only option, so just persevere and make it work.
This is idea is the ignition key of the industrial revolution. We cannot ignore it, and yet it sits in the middle of the gray area between /idea/ and /execution/, mocking the dichotomy that Scott Adams blogs about.
Re: The Value of Ideas
#45It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters.
xkcd has characters. There is hat guy, Megan, Bobby Tables, Randal, and a few others.
Re: The Value of Ideas
#46What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless? The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable…
I'm shooting from the hip here, but I think maybe there's a distinction to be made between ideas for a product and ideas as a product. The end result of the ideas of mathematicians is mathematics itself - furthering mathematics was the goal all along. Obviously ideas count when you're working within the realm of ideas alone. However, when the ideas are a means to an end (e.g., a movie, say), the implementation is what counts. You might have the world's greatest screenplay in your desk, but if you haven't gotten to the execution stage, what kind of movie do you have? (None.) Whereas if you'd started with something, anything, like walking trees fighting hobgoblins, say, or the idea that maybe humans are just batteries for supercomputers in the future, your movie might have a chance, depending on its execution.
Re: The Value of Ideas
#47What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless? The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable…
Even though such ideas are rare, its difficult to measure their value meaningfully until something is done with them. You use the proof of the Poincare conjecture to demonstrate that Ricci flow has value for instance, but without such derivative work can you convince others that it has value?
Re: The Value of Ideas
#48This is a fantastic post by Scott. I think the great idea fallacy continues because it appeals to people's fantasy of becoming successful without much work. Anyone can imagine themselves having a great idea and then being successful. It's a lot harder (and less pleasant) to imagine taking an unremarkable idea and spending years of hard work to make it succeed.
The whole concept of the "great idea" is skewered brilliantly by the Windows 7 ads. We all get a good chuckle watching someone tell us straight faced that, just because they thought of something that could have been better about Windows, they can now take credit for it after Microsoft successfully implemented it in Windows 7. Could be useful as a reference the next time someone has a business idea that he "just needs…
It looks like their agency is still Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. For reference, here's some of their other work:
Laptop Hunters - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU
Gates/Seinfeld - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=relat...
Good News (Kylie) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU
Seems like a strange way to advertise.
Re: The Value of Ideas
#49Seems like an over-simplification to me. An idea without execution is worthless. But execution without an idea is pretty worthless too. Even if I mastered execution, I couldn't sell a product that costs you $100 and punched you in the face every time you used it, because it's a shitty idea.
boxing trainer, boom. I tried to come up with one myself (shitty idea) and thought I had one with "beer that tastes like urine", but then I realized that such a product could conceivably find a market with alcoholics trying to condition themselves against drinking. So yes, even Miller and Coors still have a market (sorry, home-brewer joke).
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Re: The Value of Ideas
#50This is a fantastic post by Scott. I think the great idea fallacy continues because it appeals to people's fantasy of becoming successful without much work. Anyone can imagine themselves having a great idea and then being successful. It's a lot harder (and less pleasant) to imagine taking an unremarkable idea and spending years of hard work to make it succeed.
The whole concept of the "great idea" is skewered brilliantly by the Windows 7 ads. We all get a good chuckle watching someone tell us straight faced that, just because they thought of something that could have been better about Windows, they can now take credit for it after Microsoft successfully implemented it in Windows 7. Could be useful as a reference the next time someone has a business idea that he "just needs…
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