Most great ideas are basically stolen, and that's fine

“I’ve come up with a groundbreaking idea!!!”

I often feel like dancing with joy about this in the shower.

But that “groundbreaking idea” almost never actually lives up to the word “groundbreaking.”

Look into it carefully and you’ll find something similar already exists, or while you’re still stewing over it, someone else comes out with basically the same thing.

What you shouldn’t say at that moment is
”Damn it, I should have done it sooner!”
The correct line is
”Oh, if other people are thinking along the same lines, maybe it really is a good idea.”

Even so, I myself tend to blurt out the former, so this post is really a warning to myself.

Watch “their” situation calmly, and check the feedback as if it were your own.

How is the market reacting?
Has a community formed?
Roughly how many people are working on the development, and over what timeframe?
How much funding have they managed to raise for that idea?
From my perspective, what are the good points and what are the bad points?

Then analyze.
What’s the difference between their idea and mine?

The relationship between an idea and refining it resembles the relationship between “talent” and “effort” in athletes.

Talent, in most cases, is something you’re born with.
Even when it isn’t innate, it’s fair to assume it was cultivated at quite a young age.
And in most cases, it lies dormant for a while.

Take Nagatomo of the Japan national team, known for his unbelievable stamina — through middle school he was actually on the side of lacking stamina.
But after various twists and turns and repeated effort, he became a player boasting stamina virtually unmatched in the world.

His rise clearly wasn’t due to talent alone, but effort alone doesn’t explain it either.
What about his teammates who did the same training as him in middle school?
Were there no players in high school who trained even harder than he did?

Better to think of it this way: he succeeded in discovering the talent that was already there.
And he also succeeded in nurturing it carefully.
The two can’t be considered separately — they only mean anything together.

Back to the topic.
Ideas either lie dormant or pop out suddenly, but almost 100% of the time, that alone is useless.
Betting everything on an idea that just popped out is far too reckless.

Take a former delinquent aspiring to be a boxer.
No matter how absurdly explosive his punching power is, if he debuts as a pro without proper training, he won’t reach even the Japan rankings, let alone a world title.

We talk about ideas “welling up” as if that makes them sound valuable, but in truth they just drop in front of you like a nut falling to the ground, and it’s completely normal for similar ones to be lying around everywhere.

It’s exactly like the under-18 generation, crawling with players who look like lumps of talent.

Talent itself is certainly amazing, but it’s actually not all that special — what follows is a process in which a great many talents fall by the wayside. That process is effort.

Ideas don’t shine unless they’re refined, and they won’t hold up in the real world.

So there’s no need to be pessimistic just because a similar idea already exists in the market.

Whether an idea turns into something great depends entirely on how it’s refined going forward.

Take Google, take Apple — both now among the companies dominating the world, but there were other HDD-based music players before the early iPod, and attempts like the iTunes Store had been made many times before.

Even in search, Google was a latecomer to an industry crowded with competitors at the time, and plenty of people still prefer other companies’ products.

So I imagine quite a few people watch their current success and grit their teeth, thinking, “Why them and not us…”

But just as no two talents are exactly alike, no two ideas are exactly alike.

Just as there’s no fixed method of effort, there’s no fixed method of refinement either.

Just as no two players are exactly the same, no two outputs are exactly the same either.

There are differences. That’s why differences arise.

So when you find a similar idea already in the market, just think of it as a player with talent similar to yours having debuted as a pro first.

The timing of a debut gets tangled up with all sorts of factors — age, circumstances at the club, and so on — and looking toward the future, there’s no clear correlation between debuting early and becoming a great player.

There are late-blooming great players, and there are precocious players who fade away.

Former Yomiuri Giants pitcher Uehara is a good example — he spent a year as a ronin, debuted as a pro after graduating university, and in his late 30s became a player who won MVP in the majors.

Compare that with former Japan national team player Morimoto, who debuted at 15 and drew attention, moved to Italy at quite a young age, but never developed after that — now, even at Chiba in J2, he hasn’t produced standout results.

Players who draw attention as prodigies and then simply fade away — that’s an everyday occurrence.

If you find a rival of a similar type, becoming exactly the same player as him won’t get you a starting spot, so you need to properly find the differences between you and him. Then clarify your own strengths and develop them.

At that point his play becomes a very useful reference.

Sometimes you’ll learn from him, sometimes he’ll serve as a cautionary example.

Before you know it, even though you started from the same talent, you should end up a completely different player from him.

And that’s where the real contest begins.

Giving up rashly after comparing yourself to others is a bad human habit.

And the comforting notion that “there’s no meaning in comparing yourself to others” is a very pleasant but completely off-the-mark piece of sophistry.

You should compare yourself to others — if you have any intention of taking things seriously.

It’s other people who bring about the recognition of who you are; it’s far too much of a stretch to think that recognition generates itself, automatically, on its own.

To begin with, it’s a mistake to view “comparison with others” as something negative in the first place.

Comparison is a good opportunity for discovery, and it’s genuinely fun and exciting.

Sure, you might end up sick of yourself after finding nothing but your own flaws, but even amid that, I want to focus on finding the point where you think, “oh, I can actually do this.”

I know that’s a difficult thing to do.

Humans don’t want to get hurt, and they hate nothing more than having a sore spot pointed out.

That’s why I said it: “Do this if you have the will to take it seriously.”

If you don’t, you’re better off not doing it.

Comparing yourself with others this way and that is stressful, and it’s not all pleasant.

On the other hand, wallowing in self-love — “I’m the best,” “my originality is flawless” — feels, frankly, incredibly good.

So I’ll say it a third time.

“If you have the will to take it seriously, do the comparative analysis. If not, don’t bother.”

This is a message addressed to myself.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/12/95/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.