Simplicity Rules

I’ve noticed a recurring theme in my work life. I have difficulty focussing. It’s not a daily problem of sticking to tasks so much as a big picture problem sticking to projects.

My list of projects is immense. Some are good ideas. One is, ironically, about giving away ideas (part of my on-going rumination that ideas are worthless). Like many people, I tend to start projects and move on before they’re really done.

Paul Kedrosky sees the same thing happening at The Goog and begs, Please Google, No New Products. The throw things at the wall mentality is great, but the step after it sticks is the tough part, no matter who you are.

The simple solution is always the best solution. I believe that, but it’s a tough place to get to. Simple is hard. Worse yet, it doesn’t always involve some divine prophecy. Sometimes it’s educated guesswork.

The best way to do simple is trim to the barest essentials. If something isn’t necessary, lose it. If you took out too much, add it back in.

It’s good advice for Winery Web Sites, a basic tenet of extreme programming, and could be the secret to Beethoven’s Fifth

Greg Linden (who writes about his early days at Amazon, as well as other tech-oriented topics) likes Microsoft’s new Wallop startup. Among its ideas is to automagically create a social network for a user without the task of adding friends.

Sounds like a great idea to me. It fits into my second rule for social websites.

It’s a recurring theme in Simplicity Rules, as well as elsewhere, that ideas are worthless. Thomas Warfield, a successful shareware programmer, writes about the “pitches” he receives:

Every few weeks or so, I get an email from somebody with a “Big Idea”.

They have a great idea for a game and just need a programmer to write it and market it. If they tell me their idea, they say, you can develop the game and we’ll split the profits.

(Thanks to The Wheeze for emailing this to me)

Paul Graham created the company that became Yahoo! Stores. He is now an essayist and small company funder. In Ideas for Startups, he also poo-pooed ideas alone:

… startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

With my ideas, I have been trying to do something. I bootstrap it. If I work toward a small proof of concept, it’s no longer just an idea. And it’s instantly worth more.

It’s through doing this that I realize that most of the work and the worth is in the execution, not the idea.