“Only Great Ideas Come With Doubts”

Everybody has ideas. They come and go often. Some are even exciting until we think them through. Some are what I call, “Ralph Kramden” ideas, where you realize that they would never have worked, and then there are mediocre ideas that might work under very specific conditions. Those ideas are marked by a wicked certainty that can only be parried by experience, good sense, and a dollop of pragmatism (which often come from indulging those bad ideas). Only good ideas come with doubts, and great ones come with fear. In the cases of truly great ideas, doubts and fears are proportional to the payoff. Truly big ideas have a sense of the impossible, the “crazy”, the “foolish”, yet also a sense that you could make them work if you tried.

Years ago, I worked on a fish farm, where we routinely sampled the stock for problems. We did this using the most primitive net bags, which could only be emptied by tipping upward, obviously but, with no handles, the netting skinned your knuckles badly. Tying rope as a handle didn’t work, so one day I unwound a piece of 1/8 poly rope and weaved the strands into the netting to make a sturdy handle. It was 20 minutes of simple labour for a real payoff. I never even got to use that bag afterward because the others would get up early to fight over it.

As a bartender, I often heard the manager complain about liquor costs, even though we had an impressive 98% usage rate on every keg of beer served. After noting how many versions of “Paralyzers” we had, I printed out the recipe list from the computer and reduced the versions of problematic recipes to one or two each. That was a couple of hours of work that netted huge savings for the bar. In case you’re asking- No, I didn’t get a raise for that.

As a hotel night auditor, I was confronted with a printer that would only print out every second check-in card on a continuous roll. Half of every box of those cards was thrown out because they couldn’t be re-fed through the printer, every box was $50, and we used ten boxes a week (for about five years!). Though not tech-savvy, I fixed that by playing with the printer settings. If you’re thinking I didn’t get a raise for that either, you are correct.

That risk of appearing “crazy” or “foolish” is the standard by which great things are judged.

In 2020 I completed a report on housing issues for a prominent provincial agency here in BC. It would be less than truthful to claim it had solved the problems- In fact, local stakeholders offered little more than a glib, “Thanks for your cheerleading,” in response- but today you can see the suggested solutions in action in Kelowna and Vancouver. A similar report for Work BC outlined the social mechanisms that impede economic growth in companies and cities alike. Though it demonstrated how internal competition can be a ruinous detriment to business, it seems we will not be held back from pursuing them. It goes without saying that in a competitive environment, there is no real expectation of teamwork. We say that there is and demand it from others, but that competition comes before everything, to put it nicely.

And so, after all the team-player-ness I’ve offered over the years, all of the “cheerleading” and optimism, I came to the issue of promoting local business with a bit more wisdom in hand, and an idea- the kind of idea that is immediately dismissed as a pipe dream but grows into something doable. I am almost afraid to whisper it: small businesses could compete with big corporations, in case it drifts away in a puff of cynicism. No certainty to it; almost entirely made of doubts, it nevertheless became a plausible action.

People will wish they had thought of it. Others, in desperation, will devalue it in a bid to get it for free. Others will try to ignore it and pretend it never had value, or that it was “crazy” and/or foolish. As everyone now knows, though, those are the signals of something really good. It is by such pleas that we know something big has happened. That risk of appearing “crazy” or “foolish” is the standard by which great things are judged. It is the point at which failure is far less frightening than never making the attempt. When this thing is released, then, don’t expect a splash like when Netflix releases shoddy science fiction movies. Instead, listen for the pleas of the competition, silent or otherwise. Their protests will keep everyone informed.

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