
Ask HN: How do you fight self-skepticism towards your own ideas? - silentfish
I keep doubting my own ideas. It seems no matter what idea I come up with I find something critical in it that prevents me from its implementing. Is it my fear to fail or inability to think positive? How would I fight this or find a work around?
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DoreenMichele
"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy."

Whatever you are dreaming up, you need to find a way to try it out. Until you
do that, it isn't even a half baked idea. The act of putting it out there will
give you critical information you can't get any other way.

It helps to start small. It helps to view it as an experiment. It helps to be
curious about how other people will react, but not looking for their approval.

People can be brutal. You need to be aware of that and account for that fact
and take measures to reasonably protect yourself. At the same time, you need
to not take it personally. Some of it has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
Some people are just assholes looking for a chance to be ugly.

In light of that, it helps to do what you can to depersonalise it. This can be
done some with language. You want to ask "What do you think of _this_
project?" rather than "What do you think of _my_ project?"

Or don't ask. Just put it out there and watch how people react to it and
interact with it. Then use what you observe to tweak it.

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mchannon
Have more ideas.

I come up with more ideas than anybody I know. A tiny fraction are any good.
The vast majority of them are half-baked. As soon as you discover a fatal flaw
(and if you're anything like me, you will more often than not), tuck the idea
away in your mental file cabinet, where your subconscious will toil away for
years, changing this and that, until it goes from stupid to brilliant.

I take criticism from others with a grain of salt, but my own criticism I've
learned to trust.

Don't feel bad about having bad ideas, or even mostly bad ideas. It's an
essential part of the process of coming up with brilliant ideas.

~~~
altsyset
This is great advice, I just want to add few things.

1\. When ever you come up with an idea, write it down in a designated
notebook,

2\. Next make a list of why it would work and why it won't,

3\. Study the pattern.

If you had made enough idea you will see how you think. You will find out if
the self doubt is coming out of fear or a logical argument. Whatever the
outcome, you would be in a better situation to take action. When you are ready
to take action

4\. Pick the idea that has highest market potential and suits your strength

5\. Elaborate it into more detail by brainstorming and taking notes to
strengthen you conviction.

6\. Execute! Execute! Execute! Don't look back

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sharemywin
Because your doing it backwards.

1\. find the type of customer you want to build a business for

2\. listen to their problems

3\. find solutions to their problems.

4\. find more customers.

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muzani
Personally, my rule of thumb is that if you don't find something bad about it,
you don't know enough about it.

What I do is list down the possible flaws of this idea. Start with the
biggest, riskiest flaw and test that. Make the test as simple as possible. If
it's a business assumption, you might go up to a potential client and pitch
it, see how excited they are about it. Your test is simply a PowerPoint
presentation.

At some point, you might need to test cash flow. In that situation you might
just want to sell something without a profit, e.g. buy it from the store and
sell it, before you get a warehouse full of goods.

Just keep finding small tests. If the tests are too big and expensive, find
another idea.

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dvtv75
Just thinking "I can do this!" doesn't mean it is so. Not every idea is a
practical one, and even if it is, it's not always appropriate to pursue for
various reasons.

Something that can help is introspection: write down your ideas on a piece of
loose leaf paper, one idea per sheet. Put them in one of those binders with
the plastic pockets in, keeping the ideas separate. As the reasons to not work
on it come to you, write them down on another sheet of paper, and put that in
the same pocket. Do the same with the reasons for your idea.

Be completely honest and blunt while writing. Once you've done that, put the
folder away and don't think about it for a few days or weeks. When you've
forgotten most of the specifics, with no emotional investment in either list
of your reasons, pull out the folder re-read the description of the idea, and
the reasons for and against it.

Evaluate each one, always being honest with yourself, and decide whether each
is a technical, rational, personal, or emotional reason, and proceed from that
analysis. (Technical, "My skills aren't there yet." Rational: "I need funding
in this field." Personal: "I have a kid and can't commit the necessary time."
Emotional: "I'm no good and can't do this.")

Understanding why you thought what might be a good place to start.

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shauns
Practically, de Bono’s six thinking hats exercise is really useful. You might
naturally dwell on black hat thinking - the exercise forces you to look at
ideas in a different way.
[https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm](https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm)

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d--b
Something that helped me is to think of side projects as projects where you
try and go as far as you can. Not as projects where you will revolutionize the
world.

Keep in mind that most projects do compromise one way or another. If you're
looking for an idea that's 100% good and ideally feasible, then yes, you'll
probably never get to it.

That said self-skepticism is useful as well...

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ohyes
Draw a box around it. Given a large enough domain any solution will have
certain flaws. If the domain is large enough without encountering the flaws,
the solution is still useful. If you can enumerate the flaws, you can note
them and come up ways to mitigate them once they become an issue.

Knowing a system’s limitations is important. You can disclaim them to all who
will listen and do your job as a cautious engineer. Perfection in a system is
often not economically viable or desirable given finite delivery of said
system.

It is similar to the exceptional programmer who creates the indecipherable
system that implements every feature that you could ever want. That’s actually
an undesirable property when you’re only selling a handful of the features.

Implementing what you need and leaving affordance for what you expect might be
a future problem/requirement is often a better approach. You don’t over
complicate things off the bat (and drag out deliverables), but you leave
yourself in a situation to make necessary changes without much trouble.

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imhoguy
Leave the perfection echo chamber. Discuss ideas with potential users, people
in the industry which you want to improve. Team up with somebody to
implement/market/sale it. Your idea benefits may outweight the flaws. Nothing
is perfect.

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manibatra
The thing that helped me was realising that ideas are dime a dozen. For me
personally, if I am willing to put in the effor to execute on it then I
believe that I am passionate enough about it and there will be at least one
another person like me who might like it. After that I would not make any
assumptions and just launch, test and iterate. Sorry if it sounds a little
confusing.

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mapster
I was a freelancer for 8 yrs then on a lark took a job from a client. I didn’t
know anything about their industry but 1 yr later and being in mtgs w their
clients I hav found a few strong needs for saas and I know who to hit up as
first clients. I am too tired to prog after work so am having freelancers make
the app mvp. Getting closer to a very real product that will be gobbled up by
a rather large but lo tech industry.

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lhuser123
I don’t know if this going to help you, but after enough introspection in all
my failures, the one reason that always comes up is ignorance. And I think
many people would say the same thing.

So my advice would be to do more research. Then more research about your
research. And keep going like your life depends on it.

Maybe doubting your ideas is a good thing. You’re been realistically
skeptical.

Somewhere, there’s an expert who can tell you, with confidence, if your idea
is good or bad, and how to improve it. So go ahead and find that person or
become that person.

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AnimalMuppet
I recently had a beautiful, wonderful idea (for a polynomial-time SAT solver).
But I was also skeptical: "The odds on this actually working have to be much
lower than 1%". But it was such a neat idea, and I could try it out with a
week or two of part-time effort. Even at much less than 1% chance of success,
that was worth trying.

So I tried it, and of course it didn't work. It was still worth my time to
try, though.

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syllogism
How could anyone provide a helpful answer to this?

If you have a dozen bad ideas before breakfast, your self-skepticism is really
good! It's preventing you from spending time on ideas that are flawed. On the
other hand if the ideas _aren 't_ bad, you're missing good opportunities.

The problem is to have better ideas, and be better at evaluating ideas. It's
not a mindset problem of being more or less pessimistic or optimistic.

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staunch
There's no other way to learn than to play the game. You should expect to try,
try, and try again. Really try to win on every attempt but be happily
surprised when you do.

Relevant PG essay:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html)

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anotheryou
If what you find is just a hypothesis, try to proof it.

Or is it just doubting your capabilities? Otherwise many new ideas have some
flaw and it takes time to find something workable. In any case it helps to
work in the general direction to find solutions.

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yesenadam
Lots of great suggestions on this page already. Asking this was a good idea.
:-)

What field are you talking? It depends. Ideas about/for what kinds of thing?

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vinchuco
Idea chess.

You make blunders. You learn from them. You move on.

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segmondy
If you don't believe in your own ideas and in yourself, why should anyone
believe in you?

Just think about that, the only person that needs to and must believe in you
is YOU.

So believe.

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nickthemagicman
I realized.

Ideas are 1% implementation is 99%.

