This article is complete nonsense and I don't think anybody will disagree by the time they read the end of this post.

Nice talk but the problem with this insight, like most on this site, is that it is largely in-applicable and I bet nobody would actually act on it if presented with the opportunity in real life.

Hey, Mr. Graham - I have the absolute best business idea in the world bar none and I'm so dead serious about it I'd sign a blood contract with you that I will commit Seppuku with a dirty, rusty, blunt sword if it doesn't radically alter the world in 4 years of its launch.

According to this essay, my "dead seriousness" about the quality of this idea should translate into a surefire success. Couple that with the notion that you won't need a weekly update as to what we're up to because you'll wind up a daily user.

Surely if this is the leading indicator of the next multi-billion dollar thing, a measly little NDA would be a small obstacle to have unfettered access to this. Care to sign a measly NDA to hear it?

Thought so. But why not - if I'm dead serious and you wind up a daily user and so you know what we're up to every day, then according to this article it's a surefire success story in the making.

Care to test the premise of this article? Thought so.

Same with that article on "outside the box ideas need to come more from outside the box people."

Outside the box people have good ideas all the time because they have a more strategic, top-down perspective and can see adjacent markets / fields of study where good ideas can be cross-polinated.

How many times have you looked at a product and thought to yourself, "I could do better than that."

11 years ago I thought, "What someone made a palm-pilot case ... with a flexible rubber keyboard on the inside which folded three ways to a full size, but flexible keyboard?" A friend and I made a working but ugly model out of parts from stuff we bought at Staples/Office Depot.

We were "dead serious" about making it work but after a year of college where we dedicated every spare minute to "making it work" nobody at palm would even listen to us because they found it impossible that anybody outside of palm could think of any useful ideas for a palm product. No investors wanted to talk to us because we didn't work for palm. And we couldn't afford the tens of thousands of dollars for the many patents it would require. BUT - WE WERE "DEAD SERIOUS." For a year.

This summer Sony just patented a "flexible, material-embedded data input device" ie, the same idea we had over a decade ago. But we were very serious so why didn't it work? The only difference between us and sony is $$$$$$ and connections - the real critical variables. Wake up people.

Try being one of those people with no connections in the industry and getting anybody in the field or investors or whatever to get you seriously enough to work with you.

In my experience, if by some far-out chance you ever get a credible party in an industry to sit down and take you seriously enough to listen to you, they still won't work with you out of sheer spite for for being an outsider and coming up with something insiders haven't thought of.

Most VCs will think you're stupid if you don't have an MBA, most programmers will whine on their blogs about how come nobody in the business world respects them just because they don't have an MBA, yet they in turn think anybody who didn't major in computer science is stupid, and so on and so forth.

The whole world is full of theorizing hypocrites and the sooner people wake up to this reality the better.

Many of these articles are taken from a top-down, "Wouldn't the world be better/nicer/more efficient if only ..." perspective.

I'm sure there are many brilliant programmers in china, bulgaria, romania, russia, etc. who would gladly hack off their legs for an opportunity to "do their thing."

But unless they live in California or, increasingly, Boston ... well tough luck.

So the CRITICAL VARIABLE is not "Dead seriousness" or even good ideas or even intelligence, resiliance, ability to ride out the storms, ability to motivate yourself when it appears like nothing is going right, etc. It's physical proximity to and connections with someone with the cash and connections to get stuff rolling.

How good idea is and how serious you are and how many times you call to tell people, "this is what we're up to today/this week/this month/this hour/next 5 minutes" would have no relevance if you lived in, say, Japan or Italy or Australia and you can argue all you want but you all know I'm right.