Seems to be a theme in my reading this week: Dumb ideas are often the best ideas.
Friday, Rolando posted a link to Paul Graham’s recent “Six Principles of New Things”.
“… this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don’t seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don’t matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it’s presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.”
Joel Spolsky probably read it too, because he just posted an article about some notable successes that he initially greeted with “That will never work”.
I’m also reminded of Farnsworth’s breakthrough with the invention of television. Several competing labs were trying to invent a working television; Farnsworth had a small shop with minimal funding. One of the critical hurdles was a seemingly impossible bit of glasswork for the camera tube. Farnsworth’s self-taught brother-in-law eventually succeeded at this task in part because he didn’t know any better and tried something that shouldn’t have worked. (At least that’s how I remember the version of the story told in Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention.)
All of which begs the semi-kidding question: are we doing something impossible enough?
impossibility
Bookmarked your post over at Blog Bookmarker.com!
Trackback by crude on February 26, 2008 at 1:09 am
It takes alot of discipline to keep a ongoing narrative around a simple idea from flowering it into something more complex. I think this is a fundamentally human problem. We get tired of our own story far before the people who would benefit from it get to hear it.
Comment by whit on February 26, 2008 at 12:49 pm