Amazing ideas are not magic!
June 21st, 2008
I was reading an article in a Fortune magazine tonight and it had a piece outlining the “Best advice I ever got” from different people. One of those people was Larry Page (co-founder of Google) and what he said really hit home with me. This one simple statement hit home for the fact that sometimes, for those of us who have several ideas running though our heads, we just have to pick one and go with it. His statement was this:
“In graduate school at Standford University, I had about ten different ides of things I wanted to do, and one of them was to look at the link structure of the web. My advisor, Terry Winograd, picked that one out and said, “Well, that one seems like a really good idea.” So I give him credit for that.”
What we see today as pretty much the top company in technology, could possibly have been started as coming from a college student advisor’s advice. So for everyone like me out that that have several ideas that you think can go somewhere, pitch the different ideas to someone you respect and just go with that one. The point of just going with it does not say stick with it even if you hit upon something else during that process. The point is to just pick something you are interested and passionate about and give it your all. Who knows what will come of it.