Early Work

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habits at work here are not very deeply rooted.

Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It has always happened, but till the last few centuries it happened so slowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn't need customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn't develop any.

We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't realize they're a special case.

Or at least, most of us don't. One reason I'm confident we can do better is that it's already starting to happen. There are already a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home. In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination � not just to have lower standards, but to [switch polarity](altair.html) entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when I meet people with new ideas. I've become quite good at it, but I've had a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means being practically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknown people. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes urgent.

But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative trick, and those tend to spread quickly.

Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups, those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just not when their predictions are [weighted by outcome](swan.html).

But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.

I wouldn't claim that people in Silicon Valley overcome these impulses because they're morally better. \[[1](#f1n)\] The reason many hope you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. For investors this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed because they hope you'll make them rich in the process. But many other people you meet can hope to benefit in some way from your success. At the very least they'll be able to say, when you're famous, that they've known you since way back.

But even if Silicon Valley's encouraging attitude is rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into a sort of benevolence. Encouraging startups has been practiced for so long that it has become a custom. Now it just seems that that's what one does with startups.

Maybe Silicon Valley is too optimistic. Maybe it's too easily fooled by impostors. Many less optimistic journalists want to believe that. But the lists of impostors they cite are suspiciously short, and plagued with asterisks. \[[2](#f2n)\] If you use revenue as the test, Silicon Valley's optimism seems better tuned than the rest of the world's. And because it works, it will spread.

There's a lot more to new ideas than new startup ideas, of course. The fear of making something lame holds people back in every field. But Silicon Valley shows how quickly customs can evolve to support new ideas. And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is not so deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.

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