InnovationInspiration

Sometimes I Wish I Didn’t Know

Over this past weekend I had some free time to catch up on TED talks and listen to some talks from iTunes University for inspiration (strongly recommend an amazing series of talks from the Stanford Entrepreneurship series - first time I’ve heard either  Bill Gross or Jack Dorsey speak, and both of them made a strong impression on me).

Ironically, a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about working on/writing about were discussed in one or another of these talks. I was planning on writing blog posts about all these different concepts, and making prototypes of interesting ideas I had - but, after seeing all these talks, I felt a bit discouraged from further fleshing out some of these ideas. They already exist… so what’s the point of working on them? As you can imagine, this line of thinking is a bit saddening… and sometimes, I wish I just didn’t know about things that were already out there. Knowledge is a double-edged sword: it can move you towards better actions, or it can freeze you in inaction.

On the one hand, knowing that someone has already developed the product you are thinking of developing, or has articulated the idea your are thinking of articulating, has the potential benefit of saving you redundant effort. On the other hand, if you don’t known that what you are planning on working on already exists, you may continue to develop it on your own, and emerge with something unique to your vision, that may potentially be better than what already exists.

A perfect illustration of this is the case of Reddit. When the founders started working on Reddit, Digg was already becoming the fore-runner in the social bookmarking domain. However, the Reddit founders had no idea that Digg existed until after they had already launched Reddit. Had they done more research, or heard about Digg, their passion, and drive to develop their own community may have been curtailed. Thankfully, they didn’t know, and they continued pushing ahead on their own unique solution to the problem! My personal feeling is that some degree of ignorance is always preferable, because  additional research has a tendency to produce scarecrows to action. 

There has to be some balance between seeking knowledge, and acting in ignorance. There is some optimum division between time spent diverging, and doing research, and time spent converging on something even though you don’t have all the knowledge at hand.

Sometimes, it really is better to not know, and to act in ignorance. Being unaware of the problems with what you’re doing, being unaware of the work that has already been done in a field, can let you push forward with an idealism and conviction in the meaning of your work, and with a novelty of approach that can be the force needed to get you far enough. Far enough - so far that once you face the problems, or discover your competitors, your vision has already been manifested in its unique form and you feel compelled to forge ahead and tackle the problems you face.  Naivety can sometimes be more valuable than wisdom. Too much knowledge before action can create fear, and cause you to steer away from the domain entirely. But, perhaps the truer wisdom is to know about competitors, to know that your thoughts have already been thought, and then to still forge ahead regardless, confident and satisfied in your unique realization of those same ideas.

It’s hard to say.