Hello friends! This is one of my longer posts. And if you’d like a more immersive version of it, why not check out my very first YouTube video about it and get to know me face-to-face a little bit 😉
If you’ve got hundreds of ideas hidden away within the pages of your notebooks and note apps, then I’m going to bet that you’ve already had a million-dollar idea. You just forgot about it.
Luckily for you this might be the essay that rescues your next million-dollar project from being buried and forgotten with the rest.
For the past five years, I’ve worked at a startup as the product designer and developer, learning how to keep track of and identify the most promising ideas across thousands of feature proposals.
And when I started applying the same systems that I used at work to my own life, I started manifesting that startup momentum by placing more value on executing existing ideas as opposed to simply generating new ones.
When people talk about creativity, they generally focus on how to come up with new ideas. But I’m gonna guess that your friction is not that you can’t come up with great ideas.
You’re surrounded by them and you’ve been inspired a countless number of times before.
The problem, I’m guessing, is that you have not been taught how to maintain the momentum of your best ideas.
In this essay, I’m gonna walk you through the key steps in the system that I use to keep my most promising ideas alive. And if you’re someone who wants to come up with your next big product idea, but who struggles with taking it from zero to one, then this is the post for you.
Give your ideas momentum
In the early 1900s, there was an American philosopher named John Dewey.
At the time, he was advocating for, apparently, what was a really radical approach to education. His approach was essentially learning by doing.
What he emphasized was switching from static, rote memorization to a more engaged kind of learning.
And I want to talk about how John Dewey’s philosophy introduces a system for giving ideas momentum.
Dewey rejected the concept of ideas as purely mental constructs. He thought of ideas as tools. To say I have an idea in Deweyism is essentially to say I have a hypothesis that I want to experiment on and test.
It was a very experimental approach to education, and it’s one that we can take advantage of in our everyday life.
A common illustration of Dewey’s view is to think about a hammer. When we think about a hammer, we don’t really understand it through the measurement of its weight or its size or shape or composition. We understand it by using it, by hitting nails on the head.
That’s exactly what Dewey was advocating for when he spoke about this learning-by-doing approach to education.
When it comes to the benefits of Dewey’s approach of learning by doing on momentum, there’s a cyclical reaction that we can take advantage of: the more we engage with our ideas, the more ideas we can actually generate.
Intuitively, we understand the benefits of testing something before committing to it, but I think oftentimes our actions don’t actually reflect that belief.
Let’s say I’m actually successful with this essay and I introduce you to a new framework that helps you identify and follow through on your next big product idea. What do you do with this essay?
I think that the problem with the current state of idea engagement is that it’s often static. We might save a post or maybe even take a note about it in our note app about what an insightful post it was that Lamar wrote, but I propose that what we need to do is switch to a more dynamic version of engagement. This is the kind of thing that Dewey was advocating for.
Turn your life into an R&D lab
The reason why our best ideas get buried is because we treat them like historical records instead of future possibilities. The trick is to treat our life like a research and development lab.
In psychology, there’s a concept called construal level theory. It essentially describes how we will act differently toward a goal or an idea depending on how psychologically distant it feels.
In our case, if an idea feels very forgettable or very fantastical, then construal level theory states that it exists so distant in our mind that it’ll resist movement. So our goal is to reduce that distance and to make it more concrete.
And we can do that by targeting one of six different levers using the SCARED framework.
Whenever I have an idea that I’m struggling to make progress on, I like to use this framework that I made up called SCARED. Essentially, I like to imagine that I’m scared of the incredible success that my idea can have, and SCARED stands for six different potential blockers to my momentum. Six different things that I can essentially trace back to why I can’t bring my idea from zero to one.
And SCARED stands for:
Scope inflation
Which proposes that the vision that we have in our head of our idea is too elaborate. When it comes to scope inflation, it can be really easy to want to constantly add to whatever it is that we’re building. We start to branch out way further than we need to. But in tech, there’s this idea of an MVP: creating the minimum viable product. Asking yourself, what is the smallest thing I can create right now that will work well and accomplish my goal?
Confidence
When we want assurance that it’s gonna work out before beginning. When it comes to confidence we tend to want assurance before even starting. We want to know that we’re not gonna be wasting our time. But the idea of wasting our time tends to stop us from even starting.
Ambiguity
When the idea hasn’t been translated into concrete action.
Record of growth
When small improvements are too difficult to notice. Sometimes progress can feel invisible. We don’t see that we’re actually improving when we are.
Eternal commitment
When trying it feels like adopting it forever because we’ve internalized a shame around abandoning ideas.
Decision closure
When experiments start but never reach a conscious decision. Decision closure is a big momentum blocker and it pretty much happens when we neglect to reflect on our progress so far. We keep moving directionlessly without any clear vision ahead of us.
In the rest of this essay, I’m going to walk you through the 3 main steps I use to target those 6 levers, so we can finally start giving your ideas the momentum they deserve.
Smart capture
If we want to maintain the momentum of our best ideas, then the first thing we have to do is capture and identify our best ideas.
Most idea systems focus solely on frictionless capture. Find an idea. Get out of your head. Write it down. Save it for later. And be done with it.
But the problem is that capturing ideas without any system to resurface those ideas is essentially organized forgetting and, in my opinion, that’s just one of the many problems with the current state of our capture systems.
Number one, and probably the biggest problem that I see with the current state of our capture today, is that we’ve been habituated to inspiration.
We see it everywhere. We’re surrounded by it all the time. And we’ve been conditioned to engage with it in such a low quality and low level way.
The biggest and most obvious example is social media.
There’s so much interesting content out there and we’ve been taught to engage with it mostly by liking it and then forgetting it.
Big problem number two that I see with our capture systems today is that most of the inspiration we capture is dead on arrival.
How often do we like posts and go back and revisit them in order to extract the information that inspired us in the first place? How often do we look at our likes holistically in order to refine our tastes? How often do we go back to our notes and our notebooks in order to revive the ideas that were once so motivating to us?
In psychology, there’s something called the Zeigarnik effect.
And it suggests that once we take a note, it kind of feels like we’ve closed the loop. Taking the note feels like progress. It feels like we’ve already accomplished our goal with that note.
Big problem number three is that our best ideas are decentralized. They’re scattered all over the place: in social media apps, in our notes apps, in our notebooks… It makes it hard to resurface and even find our best ideas.
Thankfully, the solutions can be pretty simple.
My favourite one is to essentially just create an idea inbox.
Mine exists in Notion, so any time I have an idea that inspires me, I send it over to my Notion inbox and I review it at a later time. It sounds so simple, but that simple act solves for all three of the main capture problems mentioned earlier:
It defeats habituation because we engage with that idea a bit further by actually jotting it down and sending it to our inbox.
It defeats the dead-on-arrival problem because we have a system for reviewing it.
And of course, it defeats the decentralized problem because we’re sending all our notes to a single place.
If you’re interested, by the way, I created a Notion on-the-go shortcut for iPhone users, so in one click you can send your best ideas into a Notion inbox. Get it free:
Embrace experimentation
Now that you’ve got a solid way to capture your ideas, the real trick is to turn them into something you can engage with and actually use.
Maybe you’ve felt this sort of overwhelming feeling before. Being confronted by a long list of your ideas and not knowing what to do first.
That can be paralyzing.
Which is why it’s crucial to reduce the perceived cost of action of your ideas by turning them into bite-sized actions that are easy to do.
That brings us to our 2nd step: experimentation and bringing ideas from zero to one.
I think comedians make some of the best scientists.
When you think about how a comedian prepares for a big show by testing out each of their jokes and each of their sets in small clubs. Each one of them is essentially an experiment in disguise.
They come up with an idea, and they test out the same idea in front of different audiences in different ways in order to gauge the result.
That’s pretty much the exact process that I believe gives an idea life.
The exact experiment template that I use has five main sections:
hypothesis
duration
considerations
methodology
outcomes and observations
Hypothesis
Every good experiment starts with a hypothesis. A hypothesis is essentially our way of setting the stage. If you want to turn your ideas into a hypothesis, I suggest using an if-then format.
Let’s say you have an idea to start a YouTube channel one day, but you’ve never spent any time in front of a camera. You’ve never filmed yourself, and you have absolutely zero comfort in front of a camera. But you wrote it down as something that you aspire to do. You then came across this essay, which suggests that you turn all of your ideas into experiments.
As mentioned, any good experiment starts with a hypothesis. And ideally one that turns your big ambitions into small pieces.
Since we know that you struggle to talk and feel comfortable in front of a camera, let’s make that experiment number one.
A good experiment would turn that big ambition of you starting a YouTube channel into a small, testable hypothesis that targets that main friction that you experience.
For example, in this case, your hypothesis might be something like: if I record myself for 10 minutes a day for 2 weeks and don’t publish it anywhere, then I’ll feel a lot more comfortable and confident in front of a camera.
Duration
The 2nd important part of our experiment template is setting a duration. As I mentioned earlier, one of the six biggest blockers for our momentum is a feeling of eternal commitment.
When we feel that an idea is going to take an exorbitant amount of time, we avoid it. Which is why setting a short duration makes our ideas and experiments a lot more approachable.
Considerations
The 3rd part of my experiment template is considerations, which essentially serves as a pre-mortem, an opportunity to reflect on the potential frictions and the ideal vision that you have.
Methodologies
The 4th part of our template is methodologies, and it’s our chance to get into the nitty-gritty of the experiment itself by defining our procedures and metrics.
Essentially, how we plan to conduct the experiment, what steps we’re going to take, and what data we’re going to collect along the way in order to validate or invalidate our hypothesis.
Outcomes and Observations
The 5th and final part of our experiment template is outcomes and observations. And it’s arguably one of the most important parts of this template, because it’s this section that’s gonna consolidate all of our learnings and shape any future iterations of the experiment we want to conduct.
Iteration and keeping your ideas alive
Now that we’ve turned our idea into an experiment, and we’ve conducted that experiment, and we’ve consolidated our learnings from that experiment, it’s time to decide whether or not we want to evolve that experiment.
Iteration is one of the key pillars of the research and development process.
One of the main reasons I like iteration so much is because I like to think of it as the antagonist to habits.
Perhaps a controversial opinion, but I’m not a big fan of habits.
I think that habits are a good idea killer.
I think that good ideas stem from experiencing and paying attention to frictions and opportunities, but habits get us into a routine of habituating to our environments and systems.
I think that we often engage in habits that are unvalidated.
Think about someone who wants to start up an exercise routine because they know that exercise is good for them. They likely start by focusing on their timeline.
They’ll say that they want to exercise 3x a week and that becomes their main focus. And that, I think, is where the problem arises.
I think that their focus is in the wrong place.
That instead of focusing on doing something on repeat, the focus should be on reflecting on how well the experience is going.
So instead of creating a habit of exercise, I would personally prefer to create an experiment of exercise. I would say that if I do jump rope for five days a week for two weeks, then on my last session, I’m going to be able to spend a lot more time doing jump rope than on my first session.
I think that’s a lot more valuable than “was I able to do jump rope indefinitely”, which is the subtle framing of most of our habits. Which brings me to the second thing I don’t like about habits.
Habits punish abandonment.
And I think there’s so much value to be found in analyzing and understanding why we’ve abandoned something.
If you set up a habit of doing jump rope 5 days a week and you quit by week 3, all you’re going to do is shame yourself for not being able to maintain it for as long as possible.
Whereas with an experimental mindset, you would be more likely to hunt down the friction that stopped you from continuing on with that habit.
One of the biggest benefits of iteration is that you’re constantly looking for frictions and opportunities. And it’s in those frictions and opportunities where our best ideas live.
Conclusion
So to sum up, if you want to find your next big product idea and you want to take that idea from zero to one, then I would suggest you start thinking like a mad scientist.
Treat your life a little bit more like a research and development lab by being led by your curiosity and by paying particular attention to the frictions and opportunities that you’re experiencing in your own life. Because those are the ones that you’re going to feel the most engaged with.
In order to turn your life into an R&D lab, you just have to follow 3 steps: capture smarter, turn your ideas into experiments, and iterate on them when you think that they have value.