Everyday, on my subway commute to campus, I like to skim through a random book to see if I should devote more time to it later. This morning I picked up a book I bought nearly a year ago but never had time to read. The book is "Web Metric: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success", but it was not its subject that grabbed my attention.
The real eye-catcher was the title of the first chapter of book. It goes like this
"The Web is Great: Get Over it, Get On with it"
That surely is a wakeup call, not just about the web – I think the phrase is less pertinent today than it was in 2002 when the book was written, - but about every other ideas or enterprises in gestation. Often, we spend too much time contemplating how wonderful and successful an idea would be, so much so that we lose sight of the fact that the first requirement for the idea to be successful is that it be implemented.
Since the mid 90s, when the growth of the Web opened up a whole new realm of new opportunities, people of all sorts have conceived an undeniably large number of ideas. Some of those ideas led to startups, many of which survived and are now viable businesses. A few remarkable success stories even turned into huge corporations, the likes of Google, Dell, etc. However the largest part of ideas conceived never took the first step, that of turning into action. Granted, the majority of those aborted ideas were never supposed to lead to anything good, but certainly not all. So how many Google’s never got to the starting point?
I know I’ve had my fair share of "killer ideas" that never got to the starting point, and I know of friends who were even more prolific. They would have a thousands wonderful ideas per day. Unfortunately we spent all the time pondering the beauty and owe of those ideas. So if you have one of those "killer ideas" right now, remember "The idea is great: Get over it, get on with it."