I like the idea that new ideas are crazy until they aren’t.
Honestly, it applies to lots of things.
- You don’t know if a Tweet will be useless or great until you post it.
- You don’t know if a blog post will resonate until it’s up.
- You don’t know if people will care about your new business until you try.
- And you don’t know if a logo or brand is stupid until it succeeds.
I mean, what would we think of “Uber, Nike, and Apple” if they had all been business failures?
As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” It’s a principle he’s tried to apply at Google. When Page and Sergey Brin began wondering aloud about developing ways to search the text inside of books, all of the experts they consulted said it would be impossible to digitize every book. The Google cofounders decided to run the numbers and see if it was actually physically possible to scan the books in a reasonable amount of time. They concluded it was, and Google has since scanned millions of books. “I’ve learned that your intuition about things you don’t know that much about isn’t very good,” Page said.
-Ashley Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Amazon)
