[zackmorris]

The funny thing is, as logic and science-driven as I am, I've come to believe that this is actually true. We only have to rely on audacity and tenacity and serendipity because success is an emergent phenomenon that results from a loosely associated sequence of deterministic processes.

In other words, there is no formula for success because it's not a rational construct. Many of us aren't driven by credentials or money or power, yet those things are a prerequisite for anyone to listen to us or to have any kind of quality of life in a capitalistic society. The notion of success is at odds with its expression.

It's not that ideas are worthless, but that most people don't have the discipline to trade months or years of their lives to see them through. If the person with the idea is not the one who reaps its rewards, then it's easy to see how there could be bias against ideas. I would even go as far as to say that the most successful people have the fewest ideas that would change the status quo.

To put all of that in more of a positive light, I prefer to consider the success of others as part of any idea. So in these times, I feel that most startup ideas just aren't very good. They're too busy trying to satisfy constraints of finding capital or product-market fit or achieving a big exit instead of actually solving the problems facing the world like authoritarianism, underemployment, unsustainability, etc, etc, etc that are too numerous to even begin to list here. Maybe those challenges don't require big ideas so much as being more clever with how and where we apply the disruption we're so infatuated with where it could really make a difference.

[manabovethesky]

This is my goal for www.nextcept.com. I focus all my spare time on building to see if I can create a new way of finding people to work with through personal questions rather than something like a resume. Thanks for checking out the article. It was more of just a rant about what I’ve run into over the years.