Ideas aren't easy

John Doerr^[1] is probably the popularizer if not the originator of the chestnut that coming up with ideas is easy while putting them into action is difficult. In Measure What Matters, his book about goal setting for businesses, Doerr writes:

"So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything."

I find it pretty easy to generate ideas, so when I came across the notion that ideas are easy, long before I read Doerr, I believed it and internalized it. But when I started working in positions where ideas are actually valuable, I kept finding that most people can't come up with that many ideas or run out of them quickly.

I've been baffled, for example, by the notion of using LLMs to help you come up with lots^[2] of ideas quickly. How is that possibly useful, I wondered? I can just sit down and do that myself, and the ideas will be more diverse, plus, it's fun to do. I still remember when it hit home that my capacity to generate ideas might be unusual. I met with a coworker over lunch to discuss possible applications of a technology we were working on. No one had asked me for it, and I had just casually pulled together a list of about three pages worth of ideas, roughly organized by area of application. They weren't all good and some of them were repetitive. I knew that and was OK with it. I don't mind sharing rough work product, especially when it might help inspire more generative conversation. Her reaction on seeing my list was to ask if I'd used an LLM to help me generate them, with, I guess, the underlying assumption, that it would take a long time to get all this manually. Except for me, it didn't. It was a pleasant interstitial task.

If you're also a person who finds generating ideas relatively easy, you might have been similarly tricked into undervaluing your creative capacity by the do-ers of the world. And if you're not, then you might on the other hand thought that you're defective because ideas aren't easy for you. I've come to believe it's both a valuable ability, and one that you can develop or improve.

Do the pre-work #

But how did I come to have the capacity to generate ideas easily and quickly? How does anyone become creatively generative? Some part of it seems to be an ability or propensity to disinhibit, to turn off the inner filter and let ideas flow. Some part is the ability to draw connections between disparate spheres. Finally, you still need discernment to identify relevant ideas and then follow those tracks more, and also the ability to turn the discernment on and off depending on which phase of idea generation you're in.

The first one, the ability to let go of the filter, seems most likely to be inherent to some people's personality, but it can still be trained. Drawing connections between unlike things could also be a trait, but to have access to the background knowledge to draw connections requires long and wide-ranging study, reading and studying widely, crossing disciplines, and consolidating the knowledge in your mind using multiple frameworks of thought. Finally, the discernment comes from a mix of developing extensive domain-specific knowledge and wisdom that comes from life experience--or as a shortcut--from intensive humanistic study.

That's a lot of pre-work. In that light, Doerr's dictum that "Ideas are easy; execution is everything," seems like a business school truism designed to undervalue the work of human creativity. The work of coming up with ideas looks easy because by the time you're generating them you've done the pre-work of gaining enough background knowledge, developing a richness and ideally multiplicity of frameworks, exercising your mind, and loosening up your spirit.

Years of humanistic pre-work and spiritual development doesn't fit in a pithy business book and is not amenable to measuring as a quarterly OKR^[3]. The work is slippery and vague and requires time, years perhaps, in the morass of unknowing^[4].

But it feels easy #

The process of generating ideas must have an inherent sense of ease or flow to work. It's one of those paradoxical things like meditation^[5], where you must be in a state of lightness and ease, which you must get to on purpose yet somehow without actively trying. Nothing makes it harder to feel free and easy than trying to feel free and easy. If you clench up and focus hard, it falls apart. So, from the outside, it looks easy. And it looks easy because it only works when it is easy.

Execution, on the other hand, feels hard even when it works well. You may well have moments of flow and fun when you're getting stuff done. Sooner or later though, you're going to have to work on something that feels hard. You might need to do one revision after another, scrapping whole structures or fixing fiddly errors introduced in editing. You might need to debug your code, chasing down one annoying issue after another and then find you need to refactor it all anyway. You might need to make a freaking Gantt chart to plan your timeline and dependencies. You're going to have to follow up with people and follow up again. It will take effort. Always. At some point it will feel hard, and it won't be a sign that things are going wrong. It will just be hard.

Ideas require a feeling of ease. Execution requires application and effort. The effort of effort is easy to perceive. The effort of attaining ease is difficult to perceive, especially from the outside. It's not true that ideas are easy, but it's an easy mistake to make.

It's all dialetics, darling #

All that said, I think it's useful for some of us, at certain points, to be told that it's time to put some of these nice ideas into action and find out if they work. "Execution is everything" can be just the kick in the pants that some of us (me) need to stop writing pages of ideas and start getting shit done. When you've spent too long valorizing the genius of the idea-havers, it's healthy to balance it with the counter that the ideas were easy and now it's time for the hard work. Thesis needs antithesis to move to synthesis. Then you do that again and again. Or, put another way, it's a coaching cue, a hint to avoid a mistake. Once the mistake is corrected, holding onto it like it's a complete philosophy generates a new mistake in a different direction.