A few (unpopular) truths about creativity, ideas, and getting things done.
1. The first thing to learn about creativity is that it is necessarily embarrassing by nature.
2. Your idea will necessarily look and appear stupid early on because you have never done it before.
3. Inspiration is perishable; so, act fast.
4. You will know the value of your idea only in hindsight (after you have created something out of it), and not in foresight (before you have created something out of it).
5. You rarely know what will work until you try.
6. You rarely know how big your idea will be until you execute on it.
7. You rarely know whether people will accept your idea or not until you try selling it to them.
8. Most people will criticize your idea at the first try.
9. You will be scared of your new idea until it actually works.
10. At first, only a very few people (if not only you) will actually believe in your idea.
11. Your idea will later be adopted by the masses (if it finally works).
12. At first, you will need a lot of courage and conviction to believe that your idea will work.
13. Naturally, nobody is interested in your idea; so, it’s your responsibility to aggressively and stubbornly promote your idea.
14. At first, you will way spend too much energy and time enlisting others to believe in your idea.
15. For your idea to really be successful, others must have to support it, at least in the long run.
16. You will need to do your best in convincing others to believe in and support your idea.
17. You will have many ideas in your lifetime and they will compete for your attention.
18. Unless you manage your attention well, you can’t actually execute on any of the ideas very well.
19. Nobody ends up with their original idea – ideas evolve.
20. You will necessarily change or adjust your idea as you move on.
21. What your idea will become will shock you.
22. You will be changed and overcome by your idea.
23. Your idea will take over your life.
24. You don’t know what your idea will make of your life or of the world.
25. Your idea will take you to places you never expected.
26. Your idea will do things you never expected it to do.
27. Your idea will be adopted by people you never expected to adopt it.
28. You will have to drop some of your good ideas so that your great ideas will be worked on.
29. Ideas generate more ideas; the more ideas you execute on, the more ideas will come to you.
30. The only thing that matters in your idea is its execution.
31. People don’t pay for your idea; they pay for what you make of your idea.
32. You will face a lot of untold hardships executing on your idea.
33. Facing hardships doesn’t necessarily mean your idea won’t work; you will need to really work hard before finally giving up, if you must give up on it.
34. Giving up on an idea, even if you have worked on it for a long time, isn’t always a bad thing.
35. Only give up when you are really convinced (from your heart!) that the outcome of pursuing the idea is no longer worth it.
36. In creativity, what your heart tells you is more important than what your mind (or reason or people or data) tells you, so long you are in the field you understand well or in your domain of expertise.
37. Most of the limitations you will experience in bringing your idea to life will be self-imposed.
38. You remove self-imposed limitations on your ideas by just deciding to change your mind from pessimistic state to optimistic state (this will be a constant fight).
39. The imagination of nature is far better than the imagination of man; so be open-minded.
40. Your idea requires marketing and promotion.
41. Only remarkable ideas spread fast and get promoted.
42. You will need discipline and organization and systems to make your idea work, at scale and, commercially.
43. The process of idea generation is different from the process of idea execution.
44. You may be good at only idea generation but not good at idea execution.
45. You may be good at idea execution but not good at idea generation.
46. You may be good at the two (but very rarely, because the attributes that make you most creative may actually limit the attributes required for the execution of your ideas and vice versa).
47. You will need to improve on the area you are not good at, or get other people who are better than you in that area to help you. (That is part of why you need others to enlist in your cause or idea.)
48. Your best ideas may come from places you never expect; most of them will be as a result of your interactions with your own minds, with nature, with people, with technology, or just some flash of insights and inspirations.
49. Your best ideas are most likely going to come from your domain of expertise.
50. The more experiences you gain, the more ideas you generate and the more refined and easier to execute on such ideas will be.
51. The more books you read, the more ideas you will generate.
52. The more areas or fields of knowledge you interact with, the more original ideas you will generate.
53. Realize that your idea doesn’t have to be totally new; combining different, already existing ideas will give you new ideas.
54. The world can’t be complete until you unleash your ideas into it.
55. You are part of a bigger plan for the completeness and perfection of the universe by God.
56. The universe and mankind await the manifestations of your ideas.
(More on startup ideas here.)