Mining for...jewlery?

Everyone wants to be innovative and create the next big, disruptive thing. How do you set yourself up to see these ideas? There’s a common misperception that the big ideas are very obvious when you see them. This can be true, but more often, the big ideas are messy, impractical, and hard to distinguish from bad ideas. In some sense, they have to be - if they really were obvious, either you’re incredibly lucky (possible, but by definition unlikely) or everyone else will see it too.

Looking for an obviously good, big idea is a little like mining for finished pieces of jewelry. It’s possible to find a gold nugget in the ground, but even then, you’d likely not want to wear it as a finished piece. Miners are looking for ore - not finished jewelry. So their skills are tuned to see the difference between an ordinary piece of rock, and a valuable one.

You have to have a similar set of skills to mine for good ideas. You have to be able to look past the hard challenges and unfinished bits, and see the value inside it. This means that what you're looking for will always have some complications and objections.

This isn’t a new idea - it’s the same as the “what if” vs “why not” topic. When you see that muddy rock of an idea, you have to ask "what if it was polished into something?" rather than finding reasons why it's not worth bothering with. It takes imagination, work, skill and luck to turn a rock into something beautiful.

So, keep in mind as you explore: are you looking for ore, or hoping to find a finished piece of jewelry on the ground?