If you have a lot of new radical ideas, you may be really cool and smart but that doesn’t necessary mean you’ll be successful. Ideas are overrated. All that matters in the end is how you execute your ideas. That familiar feeling of having a million (or billion)-dollar idea and getting super psyched about it, and envisioning all sorts of things for your product is almost always deceiving. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions to the rule. But if you just keep thinking about the idea and don’t convert it into tangible things that work, then it’s not really a big deal. Execution garners respect. It should also bring you down to reality. You might even realize that some ideas that sound good may turn out to be really shitty when you execute them. You may have put yourself on cloud nine thinking you came up with the idea for the next big thing, just wait and realize that it’s just an idea so far. No one can see it, it’s not useful for anyone, there’s no market value of an idea. A lot of highly ambitious people fall in this idea trap. Some even use big or really small words suffixed with whole decimal numbers to describe them, like “Web 3.0”, or like “next-generation” or “innovative” — but it’s not any of those things until it’s actually built and others think it can actually be described in that way when they see how it actually works.
This is coming from experience from being a novice designer while being highly ambitious, to be honest. Often you just have to keep a check on your ambition and get down to reality.
I’m not asking you to significantly change the way you think, because I know how that excitement feels of coming up with ideas and talking about them to people. However, use that excitement from your lightbulb moment to fuel your implementation efforts. A lot of the times you may be frustrated because your implementation so far doesn’t work anything like how you thought it would, but yeah, that’s what it is — converting ideas into working products is a hard job. I think millions, or even billions of great ideas with a lot of work put into it have failed to be of any value to people other than the person who built it, so don’t end up wasting years of work into something that you’re not sure will work.
I think the path to success lies in quickly churning out something that works and seeing the market response to it, or even how your friends react. They might like it, but do you find them using it? if not, then it’s most likely never going to be of much value to the world. That doesn’t mean it’s shit and nothing can be done about it. It just means you have to iterate and make your product better and just think technically from a user experience perspective why people aren’t using your product. It may even be the case that it’s how you’ve marketed your product that’s not attracting people towards it. This is why marketing is so important. Sometimes ideas you thought were shitty actually turn out to be good and even if they don’t seem that impressive, they make it big. Marketing efforts make or break a great product. How you brand something is very important for its success.
Anyway, I don’t really have any sort of track record of designing successful products yet, but I think this is something that a lot of people even well towards the end of their careers never realize: ideas aren’t nearly as important as execution.