Tamsen Webster shows how to make your idea feel relevant instead of generic. Do basic sourcing to see who else said it, research your audience and theme, then differentiate your idea within what already exists. She uses examples like a talk curator and dissertation advisor to show practical strategies for replication, critique, and reframing.
Today I had two entirely different conversations with two entirely different people in two entirely different contexts, and they had the same complaint about ideas. They perceived the idea, whatever it was, as being irrelevant. The first was the curator of, let's call it, a short-form talk event who said that looking at all the ideas that had been submitted, idea after idea after idea was generic, Not new. In other words, irrelevant. The other was my dissertation advisor who was talking about how often when she is looking at ideas for papers that people submit to journals or to what's known as edited volumes, themed versions of journals or books, how sometimes people have good ideas, but they aren't reframed in such a way that makes them align with the particular topic. Both of these are versions of irrelevance, and both of these are so solvable. So let's solve it. The first is the not new, it's generic. The thing is, you already know how to fix it. You just probably haven't turned it on your own ideas. Journalists call it sourcing. Before they publish anything, they go out and say, who else has said this? Where's the corroborating evidence? What else already exists on this topic so I can see what more there is to add or what's already been verified? Guess what? You can do the same thing. Simple searches, either in a search engine or in your friendly favorite AI, can tell you, hey, who else is known for this? Who else talks about it? What do they say? What's their point of view? One of the biggest ways that your idea can be seen as irrelevant is being dismissed as seen it, heard that, done that. And by the way, why don't you know that's already been seen, heard, and done before? Now I get it, sometimes people are a little bit nervous about going out and looking at and saying, what if I find that somebody has the same idea? Isn't it better that you figure that out than somebody looks at your idea and goes, why didn't they already know that was done? Personally, I would say yes. If it is something that somebody else has talked about in one way or another, by doing that little bit of sourcing, you can also immediately answer and anticipate that potential objection by saying, and here's how it's different than what this person, that person, and this other person have already said. The second issue from my dissertation advisor, this alignment with the theme, is also very fixable and frankly something that marketers, advertisers, content marketers think a lot about. And that is, given who we're talking to, what would make those people most interested in this idea? Not how do I change my idea for them, but what about my idea ties into what those folks are already looking for. This means, again, doing a little bit of background research. Adopt your marketer hat and go looking at your potential audiences. What do they care about? What are the things that are on the top of their mind? This is not about shapeshifting your idea to match it. It's about holding true to your idea and figuring out why somebody would be interested in it. In academia, this kind of baseline research is what's known as a literature review. What a literature review is really about is about situating an idea, locating an idea in the landscape of other ideas that are relevant to it. That concept is something that you can easily adapt for your idea to ensure that you are not inflicting the avoidable error of irrelevance on it. Think about it a little bit like you are the tourist board for the city of your idea. The city doesn't move. Your idea doesn't change, but how you talk to different people in different areas of the country about what they would enjoy in your city is going to be different. You talk to surfers about your beach, you talk to hikers about your mountains, you talk to shoppers about your shops, but all of it is still in the city. Do you see? Here's one last thing I want to share with you from academia. When you find other people who have studied a very similar, if not the same thing as you, That's good news. That means you're on to something. It means that you can redo, replicate what they've already done to see if you get the same results. Or you can look at what they've done and go, I don't agree with what they were doing, how, or why. Or you can say to yourself, interesting that they found that, but what about this other thing? There are so many different ways to build on the other things that you see and the other ideas and the other work that's been out there. The worst thing for you to do, though, is to make it look like you didn't bother at all. So your idea deserves that effort. It deserves that check. It deserves you doing that tiny little bit of extra work to locate it in the landscape, to understand for yourself what is the context for the idea and the context with which your audience is going to be paying attention to it, and then to find the most ideal location for your idea. In those rare times where you actually have found an unclaimed piece of land in that landscape of ideas, you still have to know what that landscape looks like in order to show the whole. So as you're thinking about your idea, think about looking at its landscape, looking at the landscape of other people who have looked at it, other people who talk about it, maybe using different language, but also in the ways that your potential audience for it or event for it is already thinking about it. That can help make sure that you've got all the information you need to locate your idea within the landscape and keep it relevant right from the beginning.
