A Simple Framework For Finding The Best Idea For YOU

Do you have a framework for picking ideas? Yes, I do. And here's how it goes. The first thing I look at is the potential of the idea. How big could it be? And you can measure it in any number of ways. If you're working on a for-profit, it can be, you know, revenue or market cap or something like that. Or if it's a nonprofit, the overall impact and what's the magnitude of the idea overall. So that's thing number 1. Thing number 2 is you need to look at the probability of that particular outcome to say, yes, this thing could be a billion-dollar company, but the probability of that is actually relatively small. Could be 1% chance of achieving that potential. Now, a mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is they look at the probability of an idea before they look at anything else. And if the probability is too low, they kind of dismiss the idea out of hand. And I think that's a, that's a mistake. The thing to kind of recognize is that just because an idea is kind of hard to achieve, just because the probability is low, doesn't necessarily mean that it's an idea you shouldn't pursue. You should balance that kind of probability and the overall potential of the idea. And then there's the third factor. The third one is what I think of as proximity. Is the idea kind of close to your heart? Is it something you're passionate about, something you enjoy? Or you could also think of proximity as, is it close to your area of expertise? Is it something you know about? So those are the 3 things. And you put those 3 factors together, and you can weight them different ways in terms of if you want to come up with an actual kind of calculation. But the math is not the important part here. The important part is actually recognizing that all 3 of those things are, are relatively important, and you want a mix of those things based on your circumstances.