“It’s that process that is the magic”

“Any idiot can have an idea.”

A trusted mentor/colleague/friend blurted this out in a meeting some time ago. He’s Italian, so the bombast of sentiment coupled with his distinctive accent must have made it that much more likely to be seared in my memory. Anyway, I can’t remember what we were discussing specifically, but I know that the general context was the ceaseless drumbeat of “input” you receive when you work on brand identity and in experience design.

It’s part of the deal when you create. You have to be brave enough to go through the act itself and then courageous enough after to hear what everyone else thinks about your brainchild. Some of what you hear will be valuable. A lot of it will not be. Even the good stuff might not be good in the way that someone articulates it to you. Sifting through it all and (hopefully) ending up somewhere even better is part of the work.

Last week, a very old interview with Steve Jobs crossed my LinkedIn feed and brought idiots and their ideas back to the top of my mind. You’ll grasp why in the first minute or so of the clip.

As a culture, we tend to celebrate ideas - that spark or moment of divine inspiration that started everything off. Who doesn’t love a good origin story that explains and imbues with deeper meaning subsequent exploits and achievements in a way that makes it all seem meant to be.

What both Jobs and my friend are saying in their own way is that ideas are wildly overrated. An idea is worth absolutely nothing without the ability to make it real and make it good. There are a lot of people who understand this either because they’ve actually made an idea real themselves or because they’ve worked with and respect people who can. But there are a lot of other people who think, as Jobs says, “that the idea is 90 percent of the work.”

Later on in the interview, Jobs speaks with the perspective of someone who has made an idea real before. “It’s that process that is the magic,” he says.

He’s right, of course. The big idea is vastly more simple to grasp and relate to, but there’s really no “magic” in the idea. That only comes when you close your mouth and roll up your sleeves.