Beautiful and true ideas

What make a great idea?

In my view, an idea that matters is one that makes an impact on the world. There are of course the once-in-a-generation ideas that transform everyone’s thinking, like evolution, the discovery of DNA, the World Wide Web, or civil rights.

But I’m thinking just a little bit smaller — probably because I don’t encounter too many once-in-a-generation ideas in my day-to-day work.

I’m talking about influential ideas that change the way a significant group of people look at the world. For examples:

• Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm
• Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score
• Joe Pulizzi’s Content Marketing
• Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine’s Customer Experience (they didn’t invent it, but they certainly elevated it and made a systematic study of it)
• Uber and Airbnb’s promotion of the sharing economy, repurposing fallow resources through easy-to-use platforms connecting owners and consumers

Great ideas are both beautiful and true

Because I work with authors on books, people come to me often with ideas. Their ideas are always flawed, because no matter what you’ve heard, ideas do not come perfectly formed into the world. When evaluating these ideas, I think about two qualities they must have to catch on and generate enduring influence.

They must be both beautiful and true.

A beautiful idea is one that is easy to describe and elegant — and therefore easy to comprehend. Complicated and clunky ideas are hard to spread so they don’t catch on easily. Looking at the ideas I described above, they’re beautiful.

• Crossing the Chasm: “It takes a different kind of product to attract the early majority than to attract the early adopters.”
• Net Promoter Score: “One simple question predicts which companies grow profitably.”
• Content Marketing: “If you create useful or interesting content, people will find you, and you can generate business from that.”
• Customer Experience: “Companies that are consistently and systematically easy for customers to work with have more success.”
• Sharing Economy: “Create a platform to connect owners of sharable resources with those who need them and you can disrupt whole industries.”

Many people have unbeautiful ideas. This doesn’t make them bad ideas, but complex or inelegant ideas rarely take off. I work with these folks to find the beautiful elements of their ideas — the “hook,” you might say.

Of course, beautiful is not enough. There are many beautiful ideas that are just wrong, or at least unproven. You need evidence. You need examples. You need proof, and that comes from research. That is the difference between a beautiful lie and a beautiful truth. Beautiful but false ideas can actually spread, but they don’t last too long because eventually it become clear that they’re wrong.

What I do to develop ideas keeps me engaged

People think of me as a book guy, because that is the kind of services I sell — services for authors. But books are really just packages for ideas. The ideas are what matters. While I know a lot about words and books, it is working on ideas that really excites me.

So how do you work on an idea?

If it is not beautiful, you find the beautiful parts of it.

If it is not proven true, you insist on ways to show it is true.

This means when someone comes to me with an idea, I ask questions:

• Who is this for?
• Can you clarify it in more basic terms?
• How is it different from another idea everyone already knows?
• Why should I believe you?
• Why does this matter?

There are many other questions, and which ones I ask depends on what I’m hearing. But I’m always thinking: How would you explain this in a simple and powerful way? And how can anyone trust that your idea is actually true?

I fervently believe that it is this idea work that is keeping me relevant in my sixties and could very well keep me relevant for decade more. It is the most engaging thing I can imagine doing.

It’s also fun because it puts me directly in touch with the most interesting parts of the brains of the people I work with. I force them to think harder and make their ideas stronger. That’s not only good for their ideas, it is good for their souls. It’s one reason why I have warm relationships with all these clients after we finish working together, because we have nurtured a powerful idea together.

These thoughts about ideas are not yet fully formed. My theory of ideas has yet to be tested; I don’t know if it is ultimately as beautiful or as true as it needs to be. But that’s why I’m putting it out there, so the rest of you can challenge it the way that I challenge my clients.

So, what do you think? Don’t hold back — I wouldn’t!