Your Ideas Are Good, until they are Proven to be Bad

Justice is predicated on the ideal that people are innocent until they are proven guilty. Without commenting on how well this idea works in practice, the logic behind such a stance makes sense. Considering someone guilty and then working to provide facts that prove innocence does zero favours to people stuck on the receiving end of accusation. It is optimistic to assume that people are innocent, and it is realistic to put effort into proving guilt. The benefit of proving someone to be guilty is to allow for proper corrective measures to b e taken. The other way around (guilty first, proven innocent) can very easily lead to improper accusation, lazy sentencing, and unfairly administered punishment.

Now, to lighten up the topic, let’s consider the nature of ideas.

I have plenty; I’m going to assume that you have plenty as well (it’s very natural for all of us to come up with ideas). Thinking about how I used to approach ideas, I recognized that most of my ideas I assumed were bad right off the bat. That seems a lot like injustice to me. Perhaps we all need to give ourselves and our ideas the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are good.

If we start off with an idea and label it bad before we can even write it down, we don’t give a fighting chance to something that could perhaps become an excellent idea. We need to give ourselves and our ideas a chance: assume they are good, and then work to show that they are not. Keep trying to prove that an idea is bad and you will either eventually be correct, or you will have already done a lot of work to prove that the idea has a chance to succeed.

At worst, you prove that your idea sucks. This is actually not a bad thing. Now, having assumed the idea was good and then working to prove otherwise, you can rest assured that no nagging doubts will pop into your head in the future. You won’t sit and wonder ‘what if…’ because you will have already found out that the what if would lead to failure.

As you work to prove that an idea is bad, remember that it may be as simple as thinking of better ideas to solve the same problem, but other times more work may be necessary. Some ideas will rely on so many variables, or be so unclear in their potential that the only way to know if it is good or bad is to act on the idea. Execute a plan and see what happens. If the result is good, the idea was good and if results were less than stellar, you’ve got your answer there too. Still, the effort is worth it.

Your ideas are good, give them a chance but always be trying to prove that they might fail. If they do, move on. If they don’t you’re winning!