What are you waiting for? Just Do It!

Do you have an idea that can solve problems for people or startup a business? Have you ever wondered why you only manage to have the idea and not making it happen? Why do you fear that you cannot make that idea work? Here are a few myths you create to stop yourself from doing so.

“NUTS is when you want to do something and you seek the approval of a higher authority. When there is no rule saying that you can do such a thing, then the standard answer is NO.”
- Sim Wong Hoo

A simple start is to ask yourself, whether you have an idea. The idea is not necessarily a business, and it could be a piece of technology to help people solve their problems. Then you ask yourself the following question, “How many ideas have you chucked away without proper research or talking to people about your idea?” You will find that this comment is synonymous with most people, i.e. everyone is just in their “no action talk only (N.A.T.O)” mode. Strange enough, it happens to many people that I meet. So, I decide to accumulate their reasons for not starting up and debunk each and every one of them to give the reader that there is nothing to worry about. Here are the reasons which they always give to tell you that they don’t want to do this:

• “I don’t want to talk about my idea”: A few reasons will suffice for this statement. Let me give you a few, for example, “I am afraid that they will steal my idea”, “I think that it’s a stupid idea” and “I want to own that idea and no one else”. Honestly, if you really have that brilliant idea and not do it, you don’t really own the idea. A simple example, why is it that the Wright brothers invented flight and have the ownership of their idea? The answer is that they made it work. Everyone has the idea of flight for a long time, dating back to Leonardo Da Vinci. So, honestly, you may have a smart idea and if you cannot implement or make at least the first prototype, you do not own that idea. Honestly, if someone wants to steal your idea, it means that it is good to start off from the first place. That will keep you in competition and make you stronger.
• “I don’t think that I have read everything that I need to know about the subject”: I hear this thousands of times from both local and foreign students studying in Singapore or elsewhere. Let me tell you a story in academic research which will demonstrate this reasoning is faulty. I once have an idea in general relativity and thought it would be make a nice summer project for some of my Cambridge students. As a patriotic Singaporean, I offer the project first to the Singaporean scholar, who were also attending the summer school with the other students I taught. This scholar told me that he was not at the level to be able to do the difficult mathematics in general relativity, even I am willing to take him through the project. I remembered his excuse, “I need to finish reading Wald, Kip, Thorne and Wheeler and (add the author’s name) to be able to understand such a difficult subject.”

  A German student of mine heard my proposal, came knocking on my door, and asked me to take him for the project. Well, just for the football fever, this German student of mine gave up a million dollar contract to play football for Bayern Munich to pursue his passion in physics. So, I tested him with the following comment, “it’s a very difficult subject and I don’t think you are on the level for this project.” He just replied me, “You are going to teach me the basics and I will figure out the rest from there. I don’t think that I need to read the whole book in general relativity and work on the project you have in mind. If required, I will pick up on my own or ask you and the other experts in town.” I took him up and we wrote a paper on that idea of mine within eight weeks (I was still a PhD student and he was only an undergraduate).

  Yes, the story sounds sexy, but I should add in the number of hours we discussed new ideas and overcome some obstacles that made the idea almost useless. We have to read up more on the subject because we realized what we have at first did not work at first. We discussed our idea with the experts and we were criticised that we were not doing it right. But we never gave up, and go back to the drawing board over and over again, with the advice of a kind professor. Hard work is an essential component of the whole exercise. We managed to write the paper in the end. That student of mine started with the knowledge he learned from this experience, and continued writing three more papers in his undergraduate years. Before he went to US for postgraduate studies, all the top schools told him that he does not need a GPA of 3.8, but just need to pass 50% for the GRE exams. He is now studying in Princeton, one of the top school for physics in the world. Contrasting him to the Singaporean scholar, that shows what being entrepreneurial is not about how much you know, but how much you work on.

• “Well, the experts say that it cannot be done”: Yes, a lot of students fear authority. It’s Asian culture, thanks to the hierarchial nature of our system. Honestly, they may be right, but at least, you should check out whether they are right or not. You should at least make it a point to check whether the claim is true. A simple way to do this is to work out the proof of concept for the technology.

  There are many stories about innovation that come in this way. The most famous one was Steve Jobs going to IBM and asked them about personal computers. He was told that it will not work. Yet, they built the first Apple II computers that shook the world. Similarly for Sim Wong Hoo, our homegrown entrepreneur, he was rejected by the National Science and Technology Board in Singapore for his sound card. He did not give up but went to the Silicon Valley to create his product and his success. It’s not an easy process and it requires hard work and pain. Deference to authority is one of the best ways to end someone’s pursuit of a dream. If an expert tore your idea down, you should try convince the other experts. If the other experts tore it down, then go back to the drawing board and start again.

• “I am afraid of failure and the others will be laughing at me”: If you are afraid of failure, you will never make it in life. We all make mistakes in life, but the truth to the fact is that we need to continue to work on our ideas. If we fail, at least we know that we tried. I was quite impressed by the people I met recently in the E27 event even though some of their ideas have been done by people in the US. At least, they are willing to give it a try to create the user base for their ideas, compare to most people who did not even dare to write the code, fearing that they will be laughed at.

I wonder whether we have too much of the “No U-Turn Syndrome” in our society. My assessment is that if you have an idea, you should give it a try. That comes to my next point. If you want to try your idea, you better starting reading and talking to people to find ways to improve that idea. You will get battered and find yourself that your original idea did not work for that thing you started with. So, what are you waiting for? Just do it!

References:
[1] Sim Wong Hoo, No U-Turn Syndrome (NUTS), Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millenium.

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