Ask HN: How do you fight self-skepticism towards your own ideas?

"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy."

Whatever you are dreaming up, you need to find a way to try it out. Until you do that, it isn't even a half baked idea. The act of putting it out there will give you critical information you can't get any other way.

It helps to start small. It helps to view it as an experiment. It helps to be curious about how other people will react, but not looking for their approval.

People can be brutal. You need to be aware of that and account for that fact and take measures to reasonably protect yourself. At the same time, you need to not take it personally. Some of it has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Some people are just assholes looking for a chance to be ugly.

In light of that, it helps to do what you can to depersonalise it. This can be done some with language. You want to ask "What do you think of this project?" rather than "What do you think of my project?"

Or don't ask. Just put it out there and watch how people react to it and interact with it. Then use what you observe to tweak it.

Have more ideas.

I come up with more ideas than anybody I know. A tiny fraction are any good. The vast majority of them are half-baked. As soon as you discover a fatal flaw (and if you're anything like me, you will more often than not), tuck the idea away in your mental file cabinet, where your subconscious will toil away for years, changing this and that, until it goes from stupid to brilliant.

I take criticism from others with a grain of salt, but my own criticism I've learned to trust.

Don't feel bad about having bad ideas, or even mostly bad ideas. It's an essential part of the process of coming up with brilliant ideas.

Because your doing it backwards.

1. find the type of customer you want to build a business for

2. listen to their problems

3. find solutions to their problems.

4. find more customers.

Personally, my rule of thumb is that if you don't find something bad about it, you don't know enough about it.

What I do is list down the possible flaws of this idea. Start with the biggest, riskiest flaw and test that. Make the test as simple as possible. If it's a business assumption, you might go up to a potential client and pitch it, see how excited they are about it. Your test is simply a PowerPoint presentation.

At some point, you might need to test cash flow. In that situation you might just want to sell something without a profit, e.g. buy it from the store and sell it, before you get a warehouse full of goods.

Just keep finding small tests. If the tests are too big and expensive, find another idea.

Just thinking "I can do this!" doesn't mean it is so. Not every idea is a practical one, and even if it is, it's not always appropriate to pursue for various reasons.

Something that can help is introspection: write down your ideas on a piece of loose leaf paper, one idea per sheet. Put them in one of those binders with the plastic pockets in, keeping the ideas separate. As the reasons to not work on it come to you, write them down on another sheet of paper, and put that in the same pocket. Do the same with the reasons for your idea.

Be completely honest and blunt while writing. Once you've done that, put the folder away and don't think about it for a few days or weeks. When you've forgotten most of the specifics, with no emotional investment in either list of your reasons, pull out the folder re-read the description of the idea, and the reasons for and against it.

Evaluate each one, always being honest with yourself, and decide whether each is a technical, rational, personal, or emotional reason, and proceed from that analysis. (Technical, "My skills aren't there yet." Rational: "I need funding in this field." Personal: "I have a kid and can't commit the necessary time." Emotional: "I'm no good and can't do this.")

Understanding why you thought what might be a good place to start.

Practically, de Bono’s six thinking hats exercise is really useful. You might naturally dwell on black hat thinking - the exercise forces you to look at ideas in a different way. https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm

Something that helped me is to think of side projects as projects where you try and go as far as you can. Not as projects where you will revolutionize the world.

Keep in mind that most projects do compromise one way or another. If you're looking for an idea that's 100% good and ideally feasible, then yes, you'll probably never get to it.

That said self-skepticism is useful as well...

Draw a box around it. Given a large enough domain any solution will have certain flaws. If the domain is large enough without encountering the flaws, the solution is still useful. If you can enumerate the flaws, you can note them and come up ways to mitigate them once they become an issue.

Knowing a system’s limitations is important. You can disclaim them to all who will listen and do your job as a cautious engineer. Perfection in a system is often not economically viable or desirable given finite delivery of said system.

It is similar to the exceptional programmer who creates the indecipherable system that implements every feature that you could ever want. That’s actually an undesirable property when you’re only selling a handful of the features.

Implementing what you need and leaving affordance for what you expect might be a future problem/requirement is often a better approach. You don’t over complicate things off the bat (and drag out deliverables), but you leave yourself in a situation to make necessary changes without much trouble.

Leave the perfection echo chamber. Discuss ideas with potential users, people in the industry which you want to improve. Team up with somebody to implement/market/sale it. Your idea benefits may outweight the flaws. Nothing is perfect.

The thing that helped me was realising that ideas are dime a dozen. For me personally, if I am willing to put in the effor to execute on it then I believe that I am passionate enough about it and there will be at least one another person like me who might like it. After that I would not make any assumptions and just launch, test and iterate. Sorry if it sounds a little confusing.

I was a freelancer for 8 yrs then on a lark took a job from a client. I didn’t know anything about their industry but 1 yr later and being in mtgs w their clients I hav found a few strong needs for saas and I know who to hit up as first clients. I am too tired to prog after work so am having freelancers make the app mvp. Getting closer to a very real product that will be gobbled up by a rather large but lo tech industry.

I don’t know if this going to help you, but after enough introspection in all my failures, the one reason that always comes up is ignorance. And I think many people would say the same thing.

So my advice would be to do more research. Then more research about your research. And keep going like your life depends on it.

Maybe doubting your ideas is a good thing. You’re been realistically skeptical.

Somewhere, there’s an expert who can tell you, with confidence, if your idea is good or bad, and how to improve it. So go ahead and find that person or become that person.

I recently had a beautiful, wonderful idea (for a polynomial-time SAT solver). But I was also skeptical: "The odds on this actually working have to be much lower than 1%". But it was such a neat idea, and I could try it out with a week or two of part-time effort. Even at much less than 1% chance of success, that was worth trying.

So I tried it, and of course it didn't work. It was still worth my time to try, though.

How could anyone provide a helpful answer to this?

If you have a dozen bad ideas before breakfast, your self-skepticism is really good! It's preventing you from spending time on ideas that are flawed. On the other hand if the ideas aren't bad, you're missing good opportunities.

The problem is to have better ideas, and be better at evaluating ideas. It's not a mindset problem of being more or less pessimistic or optimistic.

There's no other way to learn than to play the game. You should expect to try, try, and try again. Really try to win on every attempt but be happily surprised when you do.

Relevant PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

If what you find is just a hypothesis, try to proof it.

Or is it just doubting your capabilities? Otherwise many new ideas have some flaw and it takes time to find something workable. In any case it helps to work in the general direction to find solutions.

Lots of great suggestions on this page already. Asking this was a good idea. :-)

What field are you talking? It depends. Ideas about/for what kinds of thing?

Idea chess.

You make blunders. You learn from them. You move on.

If you don't believe in your own ideas and in yourself, why should anyone believe in you?

Just think about that, the only person that needs to and must believe in you is YOU.

So believe.

I realized.

Ideas are 1% implementation is 99%.