Follow the rabbit
Elon Musk wants to take humanity to Mars. I believe the moon is a better option, I am sending a robot to set things up for us there before we can go ourselves. I need funds to complete the development, would you like to invest?
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Still waiting for an answer…
No, I am not taking us to the moon. But as a product builder and a founder with a dream, I have been in the business of making such statements to people for some time now. And I am surprised by the amount of times a lot of people tend to start with “That’s not possible” before “Wouldn’t it be great if it were possible?”.
I don’t mean to judge these people. Some of them are very dear to me, there are a lot of factors at play that cause this pre-disposition. My own habit of having extremely strong opinions, and my insistence on ignoring feasibility concerns for later, must trigger this as a defence mechanism. In fact, me accepting my own lack of clarity and still moving forward, when I just have a strong hint, is something I need to work on. I suspect it is a big cause of this problem for me.
But I still want to request you to, first and foremost, imagine a crazy “wow” experience first when you are going for innovation. Once you are convinced of the wow value in your imaginary product, then and only then, raise the question of whether it’s possible.
I understand this might make you sound stupid, like it probably made me sound when I talked about going to moon. I want you to fight that urge to want to sound smart. It’s ok if people think you are bonkers, they will come around. Even if they don’t, it probably doesn’t matter in most situations.
I empathise with the need to be perceived as clever, sophisticated, thought-through, I also fall for it more often than I’d like to admit. But I also know that this need is one of the biggest blockers to my progress.
It might also be about fear rather than smartness. Maybe your life depends on getting the product right. It is natural to calculate the risk upfront. But try to suppress your lizard brain, remember that feasibility is still important, we will just figure it out after we have a wow solution. So follow the white rabbit, see where it takes you. There is no risk, it is all imaginary anyways.
If you are curious about the process, Brian Chesky from AirBnB talks about it articulately in a conversation with Reid Hoffman on his podcast “Masters of Scale”. He talks about imagining the 11-star experience first before arriving at what really needs to be done. For a preview, he gives the example of Elon Musk coming to pick you up at the airport and taking you to space as part of the 11-star experience for on-boarding you as a guest on AirBnB. The episode is titled “Handcrafted”, here’s the link — https://mastersofscale.com/brian-chesky/ .
I am convinced this is the only way to innovate, and eager to hear arguments against this conviction.
