Elon Musk and Steve Jobs: 5 Easy Guidelines for Safeguarding Your Ideas
How did Steve Jobs manage to create that simple and elegant design without filling it with unnecessary features?
How did Elon Musk create innovative products so ingeniously without diminishing their value?
In fact, it all boils down to them not letting “developments” ruin their vision.
Genius is fragile. Especially the creative genius! Great ideas can die with every step along the way. The brighter the idea, the more you need to protect it. There are three deadly dangers to your ideas:
a) Diluting the essence of the idea:
This first one kills your mind slowly, painfully. This means slowly cutting away the features that make your idea unique, even if it seems innocent at first. There is an expression in advertising called “the duck's pecking” to describe this. Ideas are not always rejected outright, but are “improved” through endless small changes. What used to be a big idea turns into quivering jelly. This happens when decision makers become worried and want to be safe and make a series of small but deadly changes.
Elon Musk explains the difficulty of producing technology that will change the world as follows:
“People are mistaken when they think that technology improves automatically on its own. Technology does not develop on its own. It improves, and will improve, when lots of people work hard at it to make it better. In fact, I think it will deteriorate if left to its own devices.”
b) Equipping the idea with unnecessary features:
More does not mean better. Compared to Apple's elegant and simple design, Microsoft over-improves its products, complicating them by adding many features; thus the product becomes overwhelming and chaotic.
Jobs describes his approach to product development as follows:
“When you first start solving a problem, the first solutions you find are very complex and most people stop at that point. But if you keep at it, live with the problem, and peel more of the onion, you often arrive at very elegant and simple solutions.”
c) Bringing two or three ideas together:
They call this last one “Frankenstein”. If two or three ideas are mixed together, the results will not be good. If you try to be everything to everyone, you can be nothing to anyone.
1) Avoid committee mentality
Forget about implementing your ideas in institutions or environments that need to be discussed for your ideas to come true. Especially in intrapreneurship, the policies of some large companies may conflict with your ideas, or people may not think the way you think or see what you see.
Here, it is useful to remember the words of Steve Jobs:
“Designing products for target groups is really difficult. Many times people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”.
If you are confident and say you will take risks, focus on how good ideas are approved in the environment where you will present your ideas. Review the approval process.
2) Reject unnecessary ideas
Great ideas are fragile because they can be easily simplified and broken. How will you protect your ideas? People can persuade you with their manipulations and divert you from your original idea. Have faith in your idea and people protect it.
3) Good ideas are the enemy of great ideas
Examining a truly innovative idea requires fierce, ruthless, even irrational dedication. Sometimes, at the end of these processes, ideas become weak and ordinary with minor changes. It may cause you to suddenly forget about the big fish and look at the small fish in front of you.
Give up temptations to pursue the good. Constantly chase the big one.
4) Avoid repeating the same things over and over again
What was once fascinating can later become mundane.
Crayola, a crayon company, started an online contest in 1993 to name a newly invented color. 2 million entries were entered, but since they did not change the format, participation in similar competitions in the 2000s dropped to 25,000 entries. Now it doesn't attract anyone's attention.
Some ideas wait to be realized for years. But they may be old and starting to gather dust.
5) Make mistakes
Setbacks are inherent in the innovation process. Learn and improve from each of these.
Jobs, “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. “The best thing is to quickly admit mistakes and continue developing other innovations.” he said.
Musk agrees with him: “There is a ridiculous notion that failure is not an option at NASA. Making mistakes is also an option here. “If you're not failing at things, you're not innovative enough.”
The bigger the idea, the more revolutionary, the more likely it is to die a painful death along the way.
Being afraid and compromising your principles can thwart your efforts to create a great business.
So how do YOU protect your biggest and boldest ideas?