Your software idea will always be better than my software idea because you know your own idea. You understand it. You don’t understand my idea at all. Whenever I have an idea and I explain a cool feature or a new program idea to a person, they don’t normally understand it. It’s not that I’m explaining the problem poorly, the other person just doesn’t get it. Then when that other person tries to explain their idea to me, I don’t get what makes their idea better than mine.
Part of the reason is that with the idea I have, I have a personal interest in not being wrong. I’ve committed time to my idea just thinking about it so thinking that all the time has been wasted thinking about the idea seems like a loss. I’m also pretty sure that if the other person just could understand my idea more, they’d see the light.
When trying to convince someone that your idea is actually a better idea than theirs, follow this rule.
Don’t.
There is a 50/50 chance you’re idea is worse but more importantly, there is an even better chance they don’t understand the idea that you have like you understand your idea. And even if you convince them that your idea is better, they won't ever feel good about admitting it because no one likes to admit they're wrong.
If you’re a programmer trying to explain an idea to a non programmer or more often a non-technical person, I often find non-programmers just can’t seem to wrap their heads around certain topics. They can’t understand why one task is really hard and another is really easy in programming.
Often I'll hear things from people like "Did you hear how much YouTube sold for? You should have built that!" or "This company just got bought out. Why didn't you build something like that?"As soon as I tell them an idea I have for software, they say "Oh, no one would use that. Why don't you build a better search engine?"
But if you have an idea, remember that it doesn’t matter whose idea is better. It just matter who builds their software idea because the idea that actually gets built is always better than the one that doesn’t.
¶ 6:55 PM
