Below is a (hilarious) video about executing ideas that I saw thanks to Merlin Mann’s posting of it at the beginning of the year. Warning: this video is possibly not safe for work watching due to some language.

[Side note: If you've never heard of Ze Frank before, then I would recommend Ze Frank's TED talk.]

One of the things I would like to focus on is a quote from Ze Frank that Merlin highlighted as well. This quote from the middle of the video:

And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should executed…But the bummer is most ideas kind of suck when you do them.

I love this quote and really the whole section in the video where Ze talks about ideas. There’s something both true and subtle in what he says. Think about everything you’ve ever seen, read, heard, or come across that made you think, “Wow, that’s clever.” You would never have felt that way without someone else executing their idea. Here’s the subtle part: How many ideas are just as clever, but were not executed upon by their thinker?

Good economists recognize the possible value in unrealized potential. Bastiat may have been the first to write about what is seen and what is not seen. Essentially, his argument boils down to this: Fixing a broken window may appear to be productive, but if that were really the case, then we should all break every window we can find to help improve the economy. In reality, the money spent on fixing the window could have been spent on something else that would have improved the world before the window was broken.

Although Bastiat was talking about the allocation of resources generally across industries, I think his argument applies equally well at the personal level. We need to allocate our resources on things that are actually productive and not just on things that appear to be productive. We need to stop convincing ourselves that our ideas are inherently valuable when they are actually not. If you convince yourself that you should hold off in executing on your idea until you’ve completely thought it through, then you will never realize the potential of the idea. It’s not enough to stop being actively unproductive; we have to force ourselves to continually produce.

Paul Graham has an excellent essay on ideas for startups that also touches on the value of an idea without execution. The hardest part of founding a successful startup is not generating the idea, it is executing the idea. In other words, there’s no such thing as a million dollar idea. Google was not a million dollar idea. Facebook was not a million dollar idea. Graham’s proof of this is dead simple:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

In other words, Google and Facebook are examples of million dollar execution, and I believe this concept is just as important at a personal level. Executing ideas is much harder than not executing them. There are all kinds of blogs out there that are devoted exclusively to dispensing advice on how to be more productive. It is easy to feel productive by reading them. It is easy to feel like you’re working on stuff. We humans are extraordinarily good at distracting ourselves or, as Ze Frank pointed out, convincing ourselves not to act, which is probably why executing ideas is so valuable.

The Cult of Done is the only example I can find that might (maybe) take executing ideas a step too far. They take an extreme position on doing things rather than thinking of things to do. (Here’s a good analysis on the Cult of Done.) We certainly need to emphasize actual execution of ideas since most people fall so far on the side of thinking and not even close to the side of doing. Perhaps adopting the spirit of The Cult of Done wouldn’t be a bad thing. After all, Ze’s right: most ideas really do suck when you do them, and the only way to find out is through execution.