Organic or Die

We all have that infamous light bulb moment. You know, the one where out of nowhere an incredible idea seems to blindside you? It seems so perfect; so memorable that you don't write it down.

And there it goes. As quickly as the idea came to me, it left me. 

This very thing happened to me about two years ago and it has been branded into my memory since. I was walking from my car to my local coffee shop and it seemed as if a car had hit me and took my mind away from my body. A powerful idea pulled my consciousness away from reality for just a second, and then it was back to normal. So caught up in the whole intellectual high that came from it, I had completely forgotten to write it down.

I went through the line to get my coffee, set up my laptop, pulled up an article my longtime friend sent me--about entrepreneurship ironically enough-- and realized I had absolutely no clue what my great idea was. 

So, I did what any rationale 19-year-old kid would do: I sat my ass down and stared at a blank piece of paper for over an hour trying to remember what it was. After that yielded zero success, I switched over to actively thinking about potential business ideas. 10, maybe even 20 ideas swirled through my head and I wrote them down. At the time, I didn't realize how poorly thought out they were. I believed I was going to be a millionaire tomorrow. 

The relationship a person has with their ideas is very much like a summer romance. Yeah there are some that will last beyond the summer, some will last a few months, some may even last a whole year. But a time comes when you realize you're up shit creek without a paddle. You were looking for greater meaning behind something so minuscule. There is no substance to the summer love, no matter how long it lasts. Your relationship doesn't hold any weight, and neither do a vast majority of your ideas. Especially if you have to force them.

I learned that through months and months of trial and error; failing at every corner of each of my endeavors painfully. Trying so hard to make something that I wasn't connected with work. Weeks of work recruiting, drafting business plans, networking with specific groups that could be of help, countless all-nighters, all worthless. 

Then there was one night, a single night, that changed my whole perception on entrepreneurship. It wasn't one light bulb going off atop my head like some dumb cliché. It was as if someone lit a match at midnight, and kissed it to a fuse leading to a pool full of C4. My world riddled by dark confusion was illuminated suddenly by a single principle.

That principle is: don't go looking for ideas to help other people you don't understand, look for problems that you encounter and find the solution. This ensures that the problem is 100% real to someone: you. 

Are you wondering about scalability? How could only solving a problem for yourself be a premise for a company?

As dumb as clichés are, they are extremely easy to understand. For the sake of contemplation, we are going to use one. The saying goes, "You're 1 in 1,000,000." I would say it's pretty accurate, roughly that ratio will have relatively that same level of: income, education, standard of living, marginal propensity to consume, etc. Now let's consider that there are currently over 6 billion people on the planet.

A little division and you have 6 billion people total divided by 1 million, which yields 6,000 people that are relatively just like you. 1 person's individual problem is shared with roughly 6,000 people immediately. As Paul Graham eloquently puts it, "You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type."

It's so simple, yet so rare. Live life constantly looking for problems to fix, and eventually you'll find that organic idea. Don't put so much thought into the company aspect of things. Let that part come naturally after you are genuinely fixing a real problem that you know intimately. Stop forcing things. If it ain't broke, don't fix it...

-Memento Mori