Counterintuitive Ideas

It might be counterintuitive, but in times of great change, where new ideas speed by our online feeds, it’s a good idea to tune out.

Tuning out, so you can tune into what else is counterintuitive, and yet more true, regardless of the time you’re in.

So here’s a list.

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Truth in silence. The people who aren’t vocal deserve a bit of attention. Why aren’t they participating in this conversation? Their silence is telling us that there’s another angle, an ill-formed idea maybe, or a quiet certitude, that needs protecting from ridicule.

Portfolios over pivots. If distribution is the scarce resource for any given project, giving up on a project can look like one of two things: I’m pivoting to something else, or I’m relegating this project to my portfolio. Of course, if keeping a project alive costs too much, that’s a different thing; retire it. A portfolio of small bets, however, compounds many small gains: skills, abilities, tastes, clarification of an overall narrative, domain knowledge, and unsurprisingly, it compounds your distribution. Too many people quit good ideas too soon.

Inactivity builds. The act of building implies that you invest effort. No effort, no building. But it’s also true that the act of resting, which sounds passive by nature, also contributes to the building act. A muscle needs rest after a workout, so it can rebuild. Goals get you far, but if you follow a sprint with a period of aimlessness, you’ll wander into random new ideas for the next cycle.

Fragile is the single narrative. There’s a strong temptation to be coherent, to fit all conclusions to a single corpus of truth. That ends up being helpful at the start, but eventually, the single narrative develops some cracks. You’ll no longer be able to draw, if taken too far, from that single narrative for certainty. It’s much less fragile to do this instead: be comfortable holding a second narrative in mind, at all times. At the very least, this will make you better at relationships, better at builging bridges of understanding of others, better at conversing. And when you’ll be shaken by a contradiction, the second narrative can take the learning. When you’re uncertain, you’re okay keeping the uncertainty in limbo while your two narratives compete.

Independence is immature. We all develop small, temporary dependencies. We borrow from the success of others, we use technologies we haven’t mastered ourselves, we create before we understand. Independence, by contrast, is only a little better. We’ve removed our dependence, but we lose the sense of connection. The most mature state in any relationship is that of mutuality: both win, both grow, both choose to go beyond their independence and both choose to give to one another. People in mature relationships go farther, over time, than their peers who end up alone.

Skillful weirdness is underrated. If everyone is doing something, maybe you should try doing the opposite. If you can stomach the cost of appearing irrational by relying on the skill that took you there, then you’ve already won. If your idea scares you, and you pursue it, you’ve built an ability most people never learn to build. And who knows? Maybe your weird idea will work out. At the very least, you might gain attention, which isn’t a bad thing either.

A recipe change can change everything. When given a set of ingredients, you can make several different recipes. This, of course, is an analogy: when given a set of skills and opinions and resources (the ingredients), you can build several different products and services. Sometimes, a bad idea, if reorganized slightly in a different combination of its components, can become an idea that’s just right. Ninety-nine bad ways for every one that’s a winner. Many bad ways to tell a story, but one way gets you the attention.

People have been buying the same way for a long time. While products keep evolving, people have been struggling with the same pains for all of history. People want to be seen, people want to be validated, people want to make progress in their careers, people want to protect themselves from being afraid. If you can empathize with the unchanging nature of your fellow humans, then you’ll know how to speak to them to help them make progress.

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Playing a longer game requires a longer view, along with some unpopular ideas.

Many of these ideas aren’t popular, partly because they’re hard to explain, and harder to live by. But because they’re found everywhere in the classic texts of history, you can bet that they’ll continue to be true over the long game too.

What will you build with these counterintuitive ideas?