Ask HN: What do you do when your insight (& vision) scares you?

- You have have gained some insights about a specific domain, to solve some challenges in this domain

- You want to setup an organisation to solve this problem

- The insights are completely paradigm shifting. When you talk to others about the problem, and solutions. You can see they are not getting to the root causes. They are just scratching at the surface.

- The vision of what this organisation could be, and the change it could initiate drives fear in you

- You are afraid of telling people what the idea & plan (how to) because you think they will call you crazy!

* As an example :

We have a hypothetical world, tataoine. On tatoine there are tribes, and all tribes resolve conflict between each other by fighting. They never do anything else.

So an entire industry has popped up in order to build swords - 95% of people are building swords in the same way for generations.

- Some forward thinking folks have come about and said your methods of building swords are not optimal. So they have optimised the method of building

- Some other folks have come about and said maybe we need new types of swords, so now they are building light sabres

NOW:

- This insight began with some first principals thinking. What should this thing actually be, no other assumptions. How can we actually solve for the right problem (resolving conflict)

- The realisation is that sword makers are producing swords for a world that no longer requires swords, but everyone still continues because they think its best

  -  Because there is so much swords produced, organisations spring up to architect "conflict" so that they can leverage the swords

- Along comes someone and says, hey instead of first resorting to war. Maybe we should just speak to each other first.

- Completely different paradigm on how to resolve conflict)

Insight was gained due to my own struggle with trying to solve a challenge in my own personal life, and not finding any satisfactory solutions.

* This is just an example, the insight has nothing to do with ACTUAL war. Just wanted to throw in the light sabre reference :)

2) Try not to care about other people calling you crazy. If you can't then talk to people anonymously

To be more clear, i am not looking for discussions on the actual problem and/or solution. I am trying to figure out how to deal with the "fear" part. If anyone has experiences regarding this it would be really useful.

> When you say you have gained some insights about a domain, it sounds also like you might be a crank

The reason for the abstraction, was so discussion can be foucused on dealing with the "Fear" part as mentioned above. I have a whole lot of self-doubt:

- Is it really paradigm shifting?

- Is it possible?

- Can it be done?,

- Can i do it?

> Finally when someone says they have a paradigm changing thing but cannot divulge it, some people may feel the person is either pretentious

Fully undersand this. There is a reason for not divulging on this forum. Mostly what i have been doing is having conversations with other people about it. Never introducing it as "paradigm shifting".

My conversations are usually around - Testing my assumptions - Testing experts understanding of the problems

Mostly when i ask the "experts" in the area, they mostly agree that it is broken, it is not doing what it supposed to do. However they are caught in an never-ending cycle, and do not see a way out.

> All of which says if you believe strongly you can change the paradigm you will have to do something to show it to people, and even the people you show it to (in my experience) will probably be too limited to see then possibilities in what you propose. The proof is in the pudding, and the weirder the pudding the more you will have to work to get people to eat it and realize how delicious it actually is.

Fully Agree, anything completely new hits up against old mental models, and ways of doing things.

> Also when someone says their idea sparks fear in them because of the implications this is also a weird thing, because it implies what - a possible result of your idea is dystopia, mass extinction...?

This is fear in me, not about the IMPACT the this will have.

* Are there any strategies people in a similar situation have used to move pass this? *