You don't need to be smart, become an idiot instead

As you can tell, this isn’t a question. It’s a message from me.

Please, readers, don’t aim to be a “smart-looking person.” Become an idiot instead.

One wall that smart-looking people typically hit, as far as I know, is “the incomprehension of people who genuinely aren’t smart.” Smart-looking people tend to try a frontal assault. They believe they can make the other person understand the clear logic unfolding in their own mind. That effort ends in vain. And then they get crushed.

To avoid that, become an idiot. Hold your head in your hands, say “what should I do,” and go consult all kinds of people. Every once in a while, accidentally consult important people, people in other departments, and people at other companies too. You don’t need to break through walls that can’t be broken through. Of course, that will create distortions somewhere, and you might feel like you’ve “lost out” (a delayed promotion, for example). Get through that part as an idiot too. In the end, if people gather around you, the project you wanted to do gets realized, and results come out, no one can possibly refuse to recognize that.

You don’t need to overthink starting a company either. If you aspire to start a business and spend every day agonizing over it, stop immediately and just drift for a while. Go for drinks with a friend, go out on a weekend activity with your family, sit quietly in a cafe and read a book. Things are actually much simpler than that. Suppose someone around you wants something, and it happens to be something you already have, or something you’re in a position to get. Give it to them for free, and that’s “volunteering.” Do it through the company you currently work for, and that’s a “job.” Start your own company to do it, and that’s “entrepreneurship.” Look around, and there are usually quite a few people who want similar things — supply that properly, and that alone is enough to be a business. It’s a very simple story.

There are actually plenty of companies built on this kind of thinking. Jack Dorsey founded Square, apparently, because he happened to tag along when a glassblower friend of his went to repair glass at someone’s home, and witnessed a scene where the customer didn’t have cash and couldn’t pay on the spot. When he asked his friend, it turned out cases like that were very common, and even when you ask for a bank transfer later, you often end up not getting paid at all — a real problem. At the time, there were ways to do remote credit card payments, but they were extremely expensive. He thought, “wouldn’t it be convenient if this could be done with a smartphone,” and that’s how Square was born.

I think being “smart-looking” is, for all practical purposes, almost synonymous with “seeming correct.” Seeming like you’ll always bring the appropriate right answer to any matter — isn’t that what “smart-looking” means?

In most situations, that sort of thing is of no use whatsoever.

Very often, the early members of a startup have some kind of “human connection” with the founder in various forms. A long-standing friendship, or a relationship that grew close after meeting at an event. Ask them, “What do you love about the founder?”, and you’ll sometimes get the answer, “Because that person is super smart.” But look at the impression people around that founder actually have, and it’s often something more like “super laid-back but seems easygoing,” or “an extreme nerd who seems difficult to deal with,” or “a fantasist where half of what they say doesn’t make sense” — expressions that seem to have two or three holes leaking water.

In other words, the real meaning of “because that person is super smart” is “because that person is, ‘in fact,’ super smart.”

Whether or not someone is smart can just be information known to the people close to them. Beyond that, it’s probably better for the impression to be full of other, more human factors — that should be what draws in more people.

Incidentally, the aforementioned Jack Dorsey’s goal in his younger days was apparently to become a store clerk at Camper (the famous Spanish shoe brand), and when that didn’t work out, he ended up working at the same company as Twitter’s co-founders instead.

The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please pick up a copy.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/10/1084/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.