Anyone who has worked with me knows that I have a lot of ideas. Most of them are bad, but that’s okay.
What I’ve learned is — when you practice developing ideas into concepts, prototypes, and working products, the exercise itself becomes the purpose. When you test ideas with a rigorous process, most of them fall apart. Good ideas make it farther, but usually fade. Truly great ideas are difficult to kill. They stick around and bug you for years. They re-emerge in different places with different people. These ideas are just waiting for someone to execute them well.
And that’s the funny lesson about ideas. They aren’t all that valuable by themselves. They are just a spark that begs for fuel. If you practice the process of validating ideas for years and years, you will be ready to execute when it matters.
The risk of ignoring ideas is that you might someday fool yourself into believing you’ve found a great idea. Instead, practice killing ideas by testing them until they die. The ones that survive long enough will be worth it.
These are the Rasputin of ideas- they have survived many assassination attempts and are still standing.
.Do Task Protocol — Imagine if you could assign and receive tasks from anyone in the world, regardless of which tools they use to organize their work. The .do task protocol packages up key information about a task and sends it over SMTP using a unique MIME type, allowing users to task anyone in the world with an email address, regardless of which application they use to organize their to-dos. If they don’t use a compatible productivity app, they can still interact with the task object directly inside their email client. Works almost exactly like a calendar invite does today. Provides extensibility so that hipster task managers and different apps can slap on their own metadata even if the canon doesn’t support it. Doesn’t require any weird one-off Zapier/IFTTT integrations, individual APIs, or permission from other apps, because it’s a decentralized protocol. I’ve met the good people at IETF who helped create iCal, MIME, and many other standards that power the web. I spent a few months studying email architecture, schemas for productivity apps, the history of clients and servers for email, and all the amazing invisible utilities that make SMTP and IMAP work so well.
Real-Time Cooks — Guitar Hero meets cooking class. Instead of reading a static recipe while you cook, you can stay focused on the dish and let this real-time game guide you through the process. Play along in real-time and learn to cook any dish, with hands-free voice activation. Timing is such a critical piece of cooking, and while cooking videos provide a great view of the process, they are impractical during the process itself. Being able to see videos of what the dish should look like gives you feedback like no recipe site or cookbook can. Do a solo recipe or a two-player recipe and work your way through different levels of difficulty as you learn to cook.
Warring Fandoms — Two authors conspire to independently create two distinct literary fandoms in which the protagonists of one series are the enemy of the other. Plays upon the misunderstood villain angle as used by the musical Wicked to create two worlds where there’s a common setting and major events, but the perspective and critical facts are at odds with each other. The tension between the two sides makes for fierce debate and out-group vilification.
Weekly Life Tracker – since 2009, I’ve been obsessed with all things quantified self and designing feedback loops based on personal data. The most dedicated project I have is my weekly life tracker. It has two components:
1. Every 6 months, I track every activity I do for a week and analyze everything by category.
2. Every Sunday, I track roughly 8-10 variables for that week that all correspond to wellness / happiness.
This is what it looks like after 6 years. It’s taken a lot of iteration to get it right.
