Early Work

October 2020

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work
is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an
irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on
where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You
have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies
beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the
stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue
past it. They're too frightened even to start.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame.
Imagine how much more we'd do.

Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habits
at work here are not very deeply rooted.

Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It has
always happened, but till the last few centuries it happened so
slowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn't
need customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn't develop any.

We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious
projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would
judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't
realize they're a special case.

Or at least, most of us don't. One reason I'm confident we can do
better is that it's already starting to happen. There are already
a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon
Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding
idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home.
In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge
to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to
switch polarity entirely, from listing
the reasons an idea won't
work to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when I
meet people with new ideas. I've become quite good at it, but I've
had a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means being
practically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknown
people. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at
you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a
power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious
if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes
urgent.

But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become
widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick
used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative
trick, and those tend to spread quickly.

Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh
on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem
clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups,
those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just
not when their predictions are
weighted by outcome.

But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas.
If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope,
consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if
you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.
In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part
of the national culture.

I wouldn't claim that people in Silicon Valley overcome these
impulses because they're morally better.
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