Try Something Now

“This insight informed everything (we did at Netflix): It’s not about having good ideas. It was about building this system, process, and culture for testing lots of bad ideas.”

–Marc Randolf, co-founder of Netflix

It’s a mistake to think that you need a good idea before you get started. Sometimes, the best ideas actually come from doing the wrong thing first. One of my favorite examples comes from comedian Steve Martin. In his fantastic memoir, Born Standing Up, he describes the moment he discovers his unique point of view on comedy. He had intended to become a magician, but he wasn’t very good at it. He realized that it was his mistakes as a magician that actually won his audiences over:

“That week at the Coffee and Confusion, something started to make sense. My act, having begun three years earlier as a conventional attempt to enter regular show business, was becoming a parody of comedy. I was an entertainer who was playing an entertainer, a not so good one, and this embryonic notion drove me to work on other material in that vein.”

It was a full three years into his magic career before he realized he was meant to be a stand-up comedian!

To me, this story gets at the heart of wrong thinking about innovation. We don't always start with the good idea. Ideas develop over time, and one of the best ways to accelerate the development of ideas is to get in the game! Doing begets learning.

I recently interviewed a couple of spectacular female founders who launched a business out of Stanford a few years back. They had a fantastic idea coming out of our class, but that idea morphed over the last couple of years, especially in the midst of the pandemic. In classic start-up parlance, they had to "pivot."

But here's the thing: you can't pivot if you're not moving forward! The only way they were able to discover the business they needed to build was by making the first attempt.

And to think of ideation as somehow separate from experimentation is to think far too rigidly. The most generative and successful folks I know are constantly doing both; ideation feeds experimentation, and experimentation feeds ideation. They're constantly winnowing, based on what's working.

Don't wait to get started.

Try something now, and iterate your way forward.

Related: Think Like A Founder
Related: Iterate to Innovate

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