HACKER Q&A
📣 tldrthelaw

What do you do with ideas you can't execute on?


Pretty much summed up by the title, but I frequently come up with ideas (products, podcasts, small apps, etc.) that I can't realistically ever act upon.[1] They go in a document or on a list somewhere, or I share them with one or two other people, and that is about it. Does anyone have any kind of procedure in their workflow whereby they make use of these kinds of bits of thoughts? Do you send suggestions to people in the respective spaces? Just tweet them in to the ether? Let them go?

[1]For the sake of argument, let's assume they are at least "ok good" ideas and the reason I can't act upon them isn't because they're fundamentally unactionable -- but I recognize that is possible too.

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Without consciously thinking about it I find that my "art" projects fall into a line between easy, hard and impossible but idealized. For instance

  * high-production rate printed cards that have interactive features but need to entice people to interact or not interact with them (this is/is not a "public affordance"); this is active and ongoing
  * putting an led light strip on my car and showing images as I drive by; hope to get this done by fall this year
  * doing a sketch comedy routine with a "videogame character" projected with "pepper's ghost"; 1.5 years out at least
That last one is really hard (e.g. gotta make the hardware, the software, do the writing, most of all find a venue) but the earlier projects will establish that I have a portfolio and get allies to make it possible. (Generically I think "videogame characters" are capable of a level of interactivity that could be dangerous to human relationships and civilization as we know it.)

What is interesting is that making the cards interactive has gotten me into issues that overlap with that video game character (making something seem to have much more agency than it really has) and I didn't expect that at all until cards failed and I had to find emergency remediations -- now those learnings are fed back into new cards.

The cards themselves have the ability to absorb anything (e.g. people like X style of art or you want to make them do behavior Y?) so these projects are a lens through which I see everything. When I started the card project 9 months ago I had no idea the cards would be a tool to face problems I have right now, but they are...

👤 shoto_io
Oh man, I had so many ideas. It's true though that ideas per se are pretty worthless. Find a problem or a need people have and then think about how one might solve it / serve it.

That's why I think you can just freely share all your ideas on a blog or so. You might attract people who are looking to find a solution to their problem.