How do you decide when to say "No"?
I read Jeff's post about coming up with ideas and bouncing them off of Claude and blinked really hard several times. His idea is clever and he has a neat Remotion video to show it. My problem sits adjacent to this. I can't wrangle all the ideas that my brain produces... every single day. It's insane. I think I have ADHD and OCD combined. I'm everywhere all at once and obsessing over every next cool concept.
Granted, some of the ideas are lame (plenty of them in the archives), but quite a few are really good and should be pursued. The problem is that there is only ONE of me.
How do you decide what is worth pursuing? Do you use any kind of metrics? Do you bounce your ideas off of someone else? Do you wing it? (my current approach)
Or does it come down to how much money an idea could make? How much it would cost to build? How quickly you could ship it?
For many of us there is an added layer. What can I build that will genuinely make a difference for someone else?
That question ends up carrying a surprising amount of weight for me. An idea can be profitable, technically interesting, and perfectly viable — but if another idea has the potential to solve a real problem for someone, I have a hard time ignoring it.
Which, unfortunately, does absolutely nothing to solve my too-many-ideas problem. So I’m curious: how do you decide which ideas earn the right to become a real project and when to just say, "No"?
Jeff's post:
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Carla Bosteder
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How do you decide when to say "No"?
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