On Matters of Importance and Casual Discussions

The Silicon Valley playbooks elevate getting early feedback on innovative ideas. The argument goes “If a person whom you randomly tell your idea can execute it better than you, you shouldn’t be doing it anyway. Moreover, if the market isn’t big enough for both of you, you shouldn’t be in that market. And all feedback is good.”

What this argument fails to mention is that there are other drawbacks to telling people your ideas. Consider Epictetus, one of the founders of the Stoic school of philosophy:

Take care not to casually discuss matters that are of great importance to you with people who are not important to you. Your affairs will become drained of preciousness … This is especially dangerous when you are in the early stages of an undertaking.

His argument proceeds to say that people are wired in a way that makes them offer negative feedback on novel ideas. That can be discouraging.

In the Silicon Valley lore, the protagonist is so confident in his idea that no amount of discouragement will deter him. Stories are told about how Tim Westergren got rejected by 348 VCs before raising money to pay Pandora’s employees back for years of working without salaries.

That is a great inspirational story. But the issue of your idea “becoming drained of preciousness” remains. Every time you mention something that is truly important to you casually, you form an association of that idea with a casual situation in your brain. That makes your idea slightly less special. When Hemingway wrote “The Sun Also Rises”, his first big success, he refused to show drafts of it to anybody, even to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who at that point was a good friend and a mentor. Hemingway was that afraid of his creation loosing preciousness.

As you invest time and effort into making your idea into reality, it becomes more and more special to you. Your idea becomes mentally connected to hard work, which raises its perceived value for you.

So the next time you have a novel idea and recall the #startup mantras of “early feedback”, “concept validation” and “refining the idea" - weigh the risk of your idea being drained of its preciousness against the quality of the feedback you can get in casual conversations.