Old Ideas Are Better Than the Idea You Just Thought Of
23rd June 2013
Jake Knapp, a guy who works for Google Ventures, channels Edmund Burke.
Some ideas are stacked up on shelves because, for one reason or another, they’re just bad. Others are set aside because, while they might be good, they’re either really hard to execute or the team isn’t ready to pursue them. Or maybe the timing isn’t right or the person who had the idea doesn’t know how to convince others of its merit. Regardless, once an idea begins to age, it can be difficult to tell whether it has potential. All old ideas are then sullied with the bad-idea funk and people forget how promising those good ideas once were. After a while, it’s hard to tell them apart.
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Making the decision to double down on something old — especially something that hadn’t worked yet — can be difficult. New ideas are fun, and they’ve got that new idea smell. It’s easy to get excited about them. As CustomMade CEO Mike Salguero said, “Building something new is far more tempting.”
But even famous inventors got famous with old ideas. Take Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Greatest invention of all time, right? And the universal symbol for having an idea. But wait. The light bulb was invented in 1840 — seven years before Thomas Edison was even born. So while he didn’t invent the light bulb, he figured out how to make it commercially viable. How? By creating a vacuum with the recently introduced Sprengel pump, invented by… you guessed it, some dude named Hermann Sprengel. The light bulb wasn’t a brand-new idea for Edison. It was an old idea that was difficult to execute on. It was the Mailbox of the 1800s.
So the next time you’re stumped, the next time you don’t know how to proceed, the next time you’re tempted to invent new ideas, take a good long look at your old ones. There might be a light bulb in there somewhere.