Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

**jgarifuna** · 08-28-2006 07:25 PM

I thought this was posted here before, but I just read it and I thought you guys might find it interesting:

http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html

feel free to post back your comments after reading it.

**Antdizzle** · 08-28-2006 07:36 PM

I'm dumb, so does this mean I will have good ideas?

**MsNadi** · 08-28-2006 07:45 PM

Interesting. Because we're girls, and bored in LA our first idea was www.idatela.com - give people a way to meet other people in LA on and off the internet with online members and offline events.

Been there, done that. The idea has like 2.5MM competitors.

Scrapped. Back to the drawing board.

**noname** · 08-29-2006 05:33 AM

Can somebody summarize it for me.

**nado** · 08-29-2006 08:49 AM

Originally Posted by noname

Can somebody summarize it for me.

+1 ... yes please

**Slevin** · 08-29-2006 10:11 AM

Originally Posted by nado

Originally Posted by noname

Can somebody summarize it for me.

+1 ... yes please

again this would be useful

**cokeclassact** · 08-29-2006 01:10 PM

basically it talks about a contest for ideas. the guys running the contest thought they would have promising ideas and unpromising ideas. they realized here was a third category. promising people with unpromising ideas. they also said the beauty of startups was that you can employ brilliant people at mundane tasks. like einstein designing refrigerators.

**jgarifuna** · 08-29-2006 01:59 PM

I think it boils down to people jumping into the first thing they think about right away without taking into consideration their other opportunities.

As per the author, part of the problem is the education system, since most people spend about 15 years of their lives solving predefined problems provided by someone else and not enough time defining their own problem to be able to select from the best problem to solve solutions.

here is the one-liner:
do what everyone else hates to do, to get paid big (from the business side that is)

If there is anything to learn from this, here is what caught my attention:

"In fact there is no such thing as "business." There's selling, promotion, figuring out what people want, deciding how much to charge, customer support, paying your bills, getting customers to pay you, getting incorporated, raising money, and so on."