There are no easy problems in startups or careers

There is a tendency from folks who are new to entrepreneurship or innovation to want to look for the “aha!” idea. That is, the mindset can usually be described something like “if I look and look and look, I will eventually find a really cool idea that no one else has had, and then I’m set!” I am here to tell you that’s not how startups, or innovative ideas work, and as a bonus, I will talk about how it doesn’t work for career advice either.

We all exist in competitive spaces. To compete, you have to do something better than other people who are also doing it in that space. That prior sentence contains a bunch of strategies: you could do something no one is doing, you could do something others are doing but not in the space you’re doing it, or you could just do it better somehow. Sometimes these intersect, like well-known stories of athletes or performers who work harder than anyone else (doing something no one else does) so they are also better at the thing others are doing. But, at some level, you have to have something that you do very well, that other want. That’s the nature of competitive spaces.

Let’s think about that in the startup space. Suppose you have an idea that no one else has had. There are a few possibilities. One is that no one wants it - bad. Another is that it’s an idea many people have, but it’s too hard to do - kind of bad (we’ll come back to that). Another is that you are actually the first person to have it - rare, but good, but only for a little while. Usually if the idea is obvious and easy to do, you will very quickly have many imitators - so you are back to the problem of “do something no one else can do”. That can be “run faster and be a bit ahead with the idea” or it can be “establish a network effect early” or it can be “sell to a big company and let them fight with their resources”.

The second case above, if the idea is merely “impossible”, is actually the one you want. That’s a place where you have a chance to innovate and work in ways that no one else has been able to yet. You may well fail, but you can at least be distinct from the crowd, and if you succeed, it’s novel and hopefully more valuable (and this is what things like patents are for protecting).

How does this tie into career? Well, there’s kind of a similar mentality on career advice - everyone seems to be looking for the magic idea that will suddenly make their career take off. But just like startups, it doesn’t work that way! If it did, everyone would do that thing, it would become less valuable, and no longer be an advantage. There are already things like this - some good career advice is “don’t shout swear words at your coworkers”. It’s good advice! You need to do this to advance (mostly). But it’s easy and obvious and (mostly) everyone does it, so it doesn’t really help give you a differential advantage.

What does help with career is effort, just like it does with startups and innovation. Not just finding an easy idea, but finding something novel to you, that adds real value, that you can do for a sustained period of time so that you are better at it than most people - the more valuable and the better you are relatively, the more your career will be helped by whatever it is. But it’s like a startup - dynamic, not static, always in need of care, re-examination, evolution.

There aren’t really easy answers to most problems. If there are, the problems are already solved. The problems that remain are challenging. They won’t all be challenging in the same way, each problem has its own, um, problems, but they will require real effort, focus, creativity and differentiation to solve well. In your personal as well as professional life.