George Kao argues that creators, especially smart ones, overthink their ideas into paralysis. He suggests publishing at 10% baked, testing the response, then improving it later. AI can help signal when something is ready enough to stop editing and start sharing.
For those of you who are like, you have these content ideas, but there's two problems. One is that oftentimes you feel like, well, that idea's not fully baked yet, so I guess I'll wait until it's more fully baked or I gotta work on it further. The second problem is, my gosh, I have a very full, fully baked idea, but when I try to communicate it, it becomes too long, too long of a blog post, too long of a video or whatever. Both of these, in my opinion, are symptoms of overthinking, essentially, right? And this happens with highly intelligent people. And, you know, this is why it's hard for people with high IQ to succeed, to take action, I should say, because high IQ people always have, well, but what about this? What about that? What about this? Thankfully, I'm low IQ. So this is why I've been able to take so much action over the years. And I'm kind of being serious about that. You know, I feel like I'm compared to my peers. Every time I talk to my peers, I'm like, they're so much smarter than me. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Okay. But I do it and that's the point. It's like, so the solution is to be lower IQ or to at least pretend that you're lower IQ. And also secondly, to understand that because of your high IQ, whatever is half-baked is probably amazing for other people. Okay? And by the communicating of it, by the working on that thing, that is part of the baking of the idea. And, and so I'll tell you, I truly now, especially with AI now, the problem is worse because when I talk to an AI about the idea, AI is like the highest IQ, you know, midwit possible. And so it's like, it will give me endless expansions and whatabouts with any idea that I give it. And now it's even less fully baked, right? Now it's, I'm even more overwhelmed with, oh God, I really should talk to AI for another 8 hours about this before I, it's, and then it's never gonna be fully baked because that's how knowledge works. It's like you learn something and now you connect it to 3 more things you didn't even know was there before. Now you connect it to 8 more things. And then, so, so, so what I've learned to do is, well, I work with AI to create content and I've actually trained my AI to notice my overthinking and just to catch me to say, George, it's enough, it's enough. I think we should move on to the drafting phase now. We've outlined enough. So if you are willing to work with AI, train it particularly to say, I tend to overthink and tend to put out too few pieces of content. Please be my coach to tell me when it's, it's enough, like the minimum viable, you know, content piece. It's enough, let's go on to drafting it. Because what we need to do, overthinkers, is to test more ideas in the marketplace to notice, oh, this initial idea, this Fine. Half baked, quarter baked, one-tenth of a baked idea is interesting to somebody. Now the next iteration, we will bake it another 10%. And I call this my 3 stages of content creation, right? Stage 1, put out one-tenth, 10% baked ideas. That's what I do all the time, especially with AI. Now all the stuff I put out is 10% baked cuz I couldn't possibly expand on what AI wants me to do. So I just put out something. And then, oh, this is interesting. Okay, I'm gonna revisit the blog post in 6 months, 3 months, whatever, maybe in a year. And then at that point, I will bake it another 10 to 20% because it seems valuable for people. I'm gonna improve it even further because here's the secret, and I'll end with this. And I, a, a good idea, 10% baked, will get more traction in the marketplace than a mediocre idea that's 85% baked. I've seen this again and again. It's really true. You think you thought through something and you spent how many hours thinking through it? It's actually not that interesting for people. If you would've put it out at 10%, you would've realized it's not that interesting for people. And this other thing though, you put it out at 10% and it goes viral. You're like, but wait, I had so much more to say about that. You really thought that was interesting? Yes. So a good idea, not when I say good, I mean in the marketplace's eyes, something that's right for the marketplace, right for your clients, right for your audience, 10% baked in front of them will actually be much more interesting. I'll put it this way, chocolate chip cookie dough. People eat cookie dough. It's not even baked. It's right. They eat cookie dough. It's not even baked. When you, when you put a different type of dough together that people will not eat, even if it's fully baked, you see what I mean? Same idea. So I hope this is helpful.
