Having Lots of Bad Ideas is Good
How writing publicly helps build critical entrepreneurial muscles
The last week or so I have had this feeling of “I want to write, but I don’t know what to write about”. I have tossed a few ideas around in my head, written some notes down, and read through some of other great Substack blogs (shoutout to Packy McCormick). Try as I might though, I still wasn’t feeling inspired. So I paused for a second and asked myself “why am I writing in the first place?” I think it’s a valid question. I’m not really an expert on any particular topic, I don’t have a huge following here, and I don’t have one concrete goal that I’m working towards that writing is getting me closer to. The answer that I came back to was that writing publicly is a great reminder that most people don’t care about what I do. I don’t mean this in a bad way. I actually think it’s a fantastic thing. It’s easy to be afraid of putting ideas out there because of how other people will react to them, but the reality is that it isn’t worth most people’s time to judge other people’s ideas. The only real time ideas are judged is when they are good (or I suppose seriously controversial). If there is one thing I have learned from entrepreneurship it is that good ideas are born out of consistently coming up with bad ideas. As organizational psychologist, Adam Grant puts it “more output = more variety = better chance of something original.”
When I started Virbar back in March of 2020, I was pretty scared of what people would say when they saw me posting online about this website I had built out with a few friends. In advertising on Instagram, I felt completely exposed; like I was putting myself on a platform asking for the world to judge me. However, what I quickly realized was that 1) the majority of people didn’t care or even seem to notice 2) the ones that did notice were close friends who thought what we were doing was pretty cool 3) the tiny sliver of people that I didn’t know who reached out to me were either interested in using our platform or had feedback on ways we could make it better. Notably missing was ridicule from people who, for whatever reason, took issue with what we were doing. I’m not saying that the internet can’t be a mean, unforgiving place, it absolutely can be. The point I am trying to make is that for me, an entrepreneurial individual with zero interest in s**t posting, the worst case scenario of publishing my ideas online is sheer indifference.
For me, this is the reason that I write publicly. Every post is a reminder that people don’t judge me for my bad ideas (at least not to my face), it simply isn’t worth their time. I think that this is such a wonderful thing because remembering that my fear of judgement is completely unfounded, opens me up to thinking more, to writing more, and to pushing myself more. Building doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. I’m not going to sit in my apartment for one year, come up with the next Apple, execute perfectly from day one, and become a billionaire overnight. Whatever my next venture is, it’s going to start rough, it’s going to require putting myself out there, and it’s going to mean getting comfortable taking honest feedback. That is why I write.