Unoriginal ideas

Ever since I read Paul Graham’s essay on how to come up with ideas, I can’t stop myself coming up with 5-6 ideas a week. Obviously not all ideas are worth working on. The process I follow is:

I have a board named personal on Trello where I note down everything random that comes to my mind. In that board, I have a column for ideas. I note down the general idea and then some thoughts on it for more clarity.

The next step is to discuss it with someone. I usually discuss my ideas with Sahil, as I always receive some great feedback and he generally knows more having run tons of successful sites.

While I have some great people in my network with whom I can share my ideas and get some feedback, there are so many who also point out that the idea is not original.

There are so many successful companies started out without an original ideas. In fact, I have seen many successful companies starting out by copying out someone else’s business model. In fact, who cares if the idea is original. No two executions of the same ideas can be similar and the end product will anyhow turn out to be different or “original”.

I have a job site, a video site, an art site, all created out of an unoriginal ideas but have taught me thousands of things that I can apply to any other project that I can work on. This knowledge in itself is worth thousands of $$$s.

The next time, someone points out that my idea is not original I’ll just point them to this post instead of getting frustrated over the thought and typing same stuff everything.