Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

Generally good stuff, some quibbles:

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution.

Good advice in the main but not 100% accurate. Some ideas are novel and good. In fact, many are. But communicating even good ideas is difficult bordering on impossible, more so for truly novel and innovative ideas. Think about how often an adaptation of an excellent novel translates into an excellent movie. It's rare. But that doesn't mean that novels (or idea) are worthless. It means that execution is hard, it means that communicating ideas is hard. Even if you can spend years turning an excellent idea into a fully fleshed out idea (a novel) it will still be hard to execute it faithfully. And by the same token, most books are pretty mediocre, for example, just as most ideas are mediocre. Trite, repetitive, hackneyed, etc. That doesn't mean all ideas are valueless, just most of them, and it can be difficult to figure that out until you've gotten to execution.

> There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere.

This is also mostly true but a bit misleading. It's nice to think that everyone is just struggling along half-assing things the same way you are, and that's true. Mostly. But there are actually a lot of people who really do have their shit together, really do know what they're doing, and are just better at their jobs by a significant margin than most people. It's comforting to think that such people are an illusion, but they are out there, sometimes they aren't even doing glamorous work. The fact that they exist isn't really terribly important (if you're really lucky you might be able to hire them, but you probably won't be that lucky).

What's more important, I think, is that there is no excuse not to try to do better, constantly. If you want to really have a competitive advantage don't worry about hiring the top 1%, rockstars, ninjas, or even necessarily the "10x" workers. Concentrate on fostering a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration. Learn about best practices. Apply them. Build policies, processes, and culture that support doing better. Study what works and what doesn't push towards an environment that fosters doing what works and abandons bad practices. Stop firefighting start doing root cause analysis. Do code reviews regularly, get better at it. Test your code, increase automated testing, increase the quality of testing. Keep moving the bar higher in terms of quality. Figure out how to accelerate development velocity. Move error detection closer to the point of checkin. Never give up raising the bar. Decent developers working as a team with a good process focused on continuous improvement will out-perform rockstars stomping on each other's toes all the time every day of the week, by orders of magnitude.

The problem (other than your inner hippie :P) is that it can be quite difficult to accurately value a software product. Most physical goods are valued based on the cost of materials/manufacturing. However software is an intangible good without those fixed costs. The closest thing is hosting.

For B2B solutions, value is more tied to how much it would cost a customer to implement your solution instead of buying yours. But even a startup founder who's been an engineer for many years might not have a clear picture of how much the previous projects they worked on cost their employer. They only see their own hourly rate or salary (which already might be low) and don't see the total cost of development, the cost of infrastructure, personnel for ongoing support, etc. Engineers notoriously under-price startup offerings because they lack the broader perspective to accurately value their creations.

And because knowing patents are valuable, Amazon will freely file for far more than they need, and employees will be rewarded for coming up with them even if they are dumb. This specific patent is likely the second in spades.

Not really. I think of the SAT as a great equalizer since a brilliant kid in rural Nebraska will do well and be able to go to an elite college, while a silver spoon heir will spend thousands and maybe improve their score but certainly not max it out.

Not to toot my own horn but I got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT with little prep, and I've tutored others on the same and only managed to eke out a little improvement. (In contrast, I've tutored math course work and had more success there.)

The math isn't very advanced, it's just a matter of doing it quickly and accurately.

Of course they have to be novel! You aren't allowed to just copy them off someone else.