True story – what seems to be many years ago now, a good friend of mine, we’ll call him L and I were sitting in a local pub talking about life in general over a few of our favourite adult beverages when the topic of music game up. Now for the two of us discussing music was nothing new, we could both be consdering new music junkies and L had worked for a major record label during our time in university. I still remember how all activity in our apartment seemed to grind to a halt when the new CMJ showed up. But on this particular day the talk was quite different, rather than discussing some great new band we had discovered, we were talking about how this thing called the Internet was going to change the way people bought music. Eventually, the idea of starting a company which allowed people to download music and build their own CD’s came up and both of us were quite excited – to this day I still remember the name that we came up with, “Frank Records” – I still love that name.
This was a great conversation and I still remember it vividly to this day, but here’s where we completely dropped the ball, we talked about it too much! We talked, and talked until our brains convinced us both that we were crazy and the idea would never work. Now I am not saying that the venture would have been successful, I am sure there were a ton of holes in our ideas, but if today’s music market is any indication we would have at least had a fighting chance.
My point is this – if you have an idea, act on it – today! Don’t keep talking about it because I guarntee you that you’re “inner voice” will convince you that it’s the stupidest idea it’s ever heard and you’ll stop right there. You don’t have to run out and spend a ton of cash by starting a company and hiring staff, but at least build the prototype, test it, and refine your original idea. You just never know you may have the next killer idea.
If you don’t you may just regret your decision later on.
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I’m not sure this is the best example to use — the contracts, usage rights, and DRM hardware-software linkage issues with digital music are still non-trivial to navigate and very few people (like Steve Jobs) have ever been in a position to get enough stakeholders to the table to approach critical mass. In this case, the problem was really never about stumbling on the idea: there were thousands if not millions of people that had similar ideas but were not positioned to successfully execute the concept.
There’s a big difference between passing on an interesting idea that is novel mainly because it directly challenges entrenched business interests that you’re not positioned to take on and talking yourself out of an interesting and novel idea that just needs enough of your time and attention to take root.