Why Being An “Ideas Man” Is Going To Help You Fail
A lot of would-be entrepreneurs – and young people in general – think that their ideal role in life is as “an idea person.”
There are numerous causes for this;
- A University system that teaches you for management roles (that don’t really exist)
- A whole education system that’s based on academics and theories
- A culture that degrades manual work and worships vague I’m-just-me lifestyle choices
- People wanting to avoid doing any actual work
- Self-help gurus and lifehackers who promote not doing work as a virtue
- A completely dismantled manufacturing industry which distances people from the creation of stuff altogether
Countless other reasons abound.
What they all have in common is that they are stupid.
People who think “I’m going to be an ideas man” are doing themselves a disservice. They are wasting time and they’re going to become outcompeted.
Now, if this were a stupid political-philosophy blog, I’d spend the next thousand words talking about how this will lead to the fall of The West and how masculinity is dead, the American Dream is dead and all that nonsense.
This isn’t a stupid blog though, so I’m only concerned with saving my readers from this fate. Bigger implications can wait.
(Side note: The best way to solve big problems is to solve little ones. That’s what we’re doing here.)
Ideas are worth $0 without implementation.
Let’s forget about big implications and run some basic math.
What is the value of the world’s best idea if it’s never implemented?
Zero.
Until the 20th Century, men couldn’t fly. There were no airplanes, helicopters or other flying vehicles. (With a few exceptions that prove the rule.)
Now, do you think the guys who invented the first aeroplane were the first people to think, “Hey… wouldn’t it be great if someone built something to help us fly?”
Spoiler: They absolutely weren’t. Mythology and history is filled with stories of people trying to achieve manned flight.
The air industry is worth billions of pounds. It’s implications are worth trillions.
Nobody gave the first guy who said, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could fly?” a billion dollars.
The idea is cheap.
The implementation took millennia and is obviously worth a huge amount.
Without being able to implement an idea, it is worth exactly nothing.
Now, you might think that your internet business – or whatever – has nothing to do with planes or big business. You might not care about the implications or any of that boring stuff.
You just want to get in, make some money and get out… slow it down there.
You’re an Inefficiency In The System
You might want to get in, get rich and get out. Doesn’t everyone?
You might think that you can outsource everything and skim off the top. “I’m an ideas man.”
Here’s the real deal about that idea: When you’re outsourcing everything, you have no power whatsoever. If you’re dropshipping from China, prepare for quality control issues. When you’re running an SEO service, prepare for your freelancers to share your backlink profile with the dubious-legality porn sites and casino scams.
If you’re running a middle-man business where you hire a worker and then sell the work at a cost, prepare for the worker to eventually say, “Hey… I don’t need you anymore. Bye!”
That is the crux of the problem. If you’re trying to run a turnkey business which takes you out of the equation, there’s no market need for you to be there at all.
Here’s the crazy thing about capitalism: Inefficiencies in the market always get ironed out. Why build a business where you’re the inefficiency?
Nobody Is Going To Build An Empire For You
“But Jamie,” the would-be digital nomad entrepreneur says, “I provide the ideas!”
… Ideas are massively overrated by young business folk. I’m not pointing fingers; we’re all guilty of it. At some point, you’re going to imagine that you sit in a gold-lined office (or a tropical beach paradise) rattling off genius-inspired ideas while some poor minion deals with the work of working out how it works.
Not going to happen.
Here’s why.
People With Skills Are Valuable
I’m relatively small-scale on the internet scale, yet occasionally I get an email to my business-places along the lines of, “Hey… I’ve got this idea. Why don’t you do the writing and we’ll split the money 50/50?”
This is almost always a lose-lose proposition for the service provider. For one thing, ideas are pretty common and chances are your idea isn’t a winner. More on that in a second. Secondly, the service provider is doing all the god-damned work. Seeing as your idea is worth exactly $0 with no implementation, paying someone $0 for their time and effort is not a great thing to do. Thirdly, people with a service already have work that pays.
I often humour these requests and say, “Hey, sure… my rate is X and then I’ll take a royalty of X.” This is quite common in copywriting
The responses are golden. “What! You want paying AND a cut!!! That’s Ridiculous!”
What’s ridiculous is 99% of these requests are stupid. “Hey Jamie, I was thinking of building a niche site about fitness. How about you write the articles for free and I give you the ideas?”
To add insult to injury, “Hey… before I tell you about this super-secret idea that’s totally not a rip-off niche site of whatever’s popular right now, sign an NDA and a No-compete contract to promise you’ll never create a niche site again because hey I’ve given you the idea to create a niche site!”
Again, you can’t do business like this… and if you’re trying to do business like this, your ideas are weak and you’re not going to be able to compete with anyone anyway.
Cheat Sheet
- People with in-demand skills can get paid outright, collect royalties/equity and/or start their own projects… they don’t need you to supply ideas because there are many ideas and no time to implement them.
- Again, if you’re supplying the ideas and not doing the work… you’re risking getting replaced
- People massively understate how complicated outsourcing is. Managing a team is inefficient and if you’re starting out, this will massively hamper your competitive status.
- Ideas are worth $0 without implementation, but implementation is worth $$$$ even without good ideas
If you think like a wantrepreneur and the above offends you, then it’s probably down to one thing only: You don’t have any valuable skills that you can leverage.
Let’s talk about that.
It Takes A Couple Of Years To Learn A Skill… Or You Can Sit On The Treadmill Forever
You can make real money pretty quickly online. Over time, that money can grow and snowball.
It sounds like the anti-thesis to the rest of this article, but for one thing: You need to sell something valuable.
If you don’t have anything valuable to sell, then you’re going to bounce around from weak project to weak project idea until you run out of money.
The quickest, most reliable way to ensure you don’t have this problem is to learn the skills that you want to outsource.
Let’s take copywriting, for example. (I know – original.)
You can outsource to a guy like me. If you’re lucky, you find a copywriter who is just starting out. They work on Fiverr or Upwork and charge pennies.
You hire them for six months before you notice that they’re taking longer to do the work, they don’t seem eager and suddenly $5 isn’t enough.
Now, you can churn and burn writers, but you’ll eventually have this problem with all of them.
Why?
Because they’re building a skill, and eventually they realise they don’t have to work for $5 when their skill dictates that they can get $500. Then $5000. Then wherever they’re off to.
You can sell T-shirts this year and spam Instagram next year and stay in the metaphorical shallow-end of the entrepreneur pool.
Or, you could learn copywriting. You could start by charging $0.01 a word, and eventually realise you can charge £0.02, £0.05, £0.1 or more. You can say, “Hey… why don’t I use my skills to build a website?” and start making money passively.
Then you might say to a client, “Hey… how much did my last sales letter make?” They might say, “It was great… it made more than a million dollars.”
Then suddenly, you realise that your skill is worth a lot more than you realise, and you stopped swimming in the shallow end a long time ago.
In the end, you’re spending your time whatever you do. Isn’t it better to learn a skill that’ll take you to the deep end rather than doggy-paddling for the rest of your career?
Think of your ideas as a floatation device. If you can only doggy-paddle, then you’re not getting very far even with the best idea.
If you can swim properly, then you don’t really need much of a floatation device at all, but you can take it a lot further anyway.