According to Guy Kawasaki, “if you are not confident about your own product, then nobody else will be. Believe in yourself, believe in what you believe and the world will follow your belief”. As much as I would like to endorse what he said, I would like to add that you will never have a one hundred percent belief that your idea will work the way you envisioned it. The most you can have is thirty percent. Make it sixty five percent if you have conducted life testing on it. Behind this truth is that no matter how good you can design your product, you will always have that fear that perhaps you have not taken into account something that will render your conception unworkable. Although we have to show confidence in what we do, we are after all not infallible, and just like what Murphy’s Law states, “if anything can go wrong, it will”. And what if you are not sure?
If you have an idea and would like others to follow that idea, you will need plenty of showmanship. You not only need to be positive, you also need to act positive, no matter what amount of issues that you are worried about behind your mind. You will also have to pray diligently, hoping that the dreaded thing will not have the opportunity to disentangle all that you have built. But still, acting is acting, and reality will still be reality. Occasionally though, there are people out there who seems to have more confidence than ourselves. They have that intuition that our idea will work, even though they do not know about the mechanism that makes our idea work! And imagine the amount of euphoria that they can give us when they indicate to us that our idea is that fantastic. They are like the missing enzyme that can propel our idea to the stratosphere. It is rare, but it does happen, and most creators need it.
What about those who are dead set that their idea will work out, no matter what? These are incredible guys, no, make it obstinate guys, or gals if you like. They have what we called a ‘one track mind’, and they can really focus well. But unfortunately, some ideas don’t work at all, even after years of trying by their proponent. The least they can say is that ‘well, at least I have tried’. However, some of these ideas are revolutionary, to say the least. And like revolutions, there is a time and place for it to happen. Obviously, stories abound of ideas that failed, and obviously, many others were unrecorded. If however there is a place or a repository of these failed ideas, then perhaps someone can pick on it at a later date, and combined with newer materials, could add one and two together and make it work. If we look at some of those ideas that have changed our lifestyles through the ages, we will find many examples of ideas that are reworked from previous known ideas.
But looking back again where we have others who are more confident about our ideas than we ourselves. It does happen more often than we realize. And it does not confined to tangible ideas only. Certainly when a politician goes up the pulpit and shout out their battle cry for the first time and find that the crowd out there responded with plenty of agreement, the politician’s adrenalin will shoot up few hundred degrees. The unexpected boost will make the politician go further. He is made to believe that even God is with him! So are purveyors of ideas. If you are not sure about it yourself, go out there and tell it out loud and clear. Perhaps someone out there will give you that boost, that so called ‘intuitive endorsement’ that will make everything possible. Don’t be disheartened if you are only thirty percent sure of your idea working. Your other seventy percent might come from somewhere out there, on a fine day!
By an overworked inventor
