> pre-idea individuals

First time I am hearing this term. It is a euphemism like pre-owned cars (instead of used cars).

What does this mean? People who do not yet have any idea? Weird.

Sadly, yes, a lot of people want to be entrepreneurs for prestige/wealth. In their imagination they skip ahead to a fantastical ending: being rich and respected.

I find this disturbing. How can someone be useful to others without an idea of what that even means? How can one provide a novel offering without even caring about it? It's an expression of missing craft and bad taste. These aspirations are reactive, not generated by something beautiful (like kindness, or optimism).

Fortunately it is not hopeless; aspiring entrepreneurs can find deeper motivation if they look for it.

(I like to give the following advice: it is easier to first be useful to others and become rich than it is to be rich and then become useful to others. This almost certainly requires sufficient empathy and care to have a hypothesis and be "post-idea".)

YC tried this at some point. Just hire white guys that seem "bright" on paper but can't come up with any idea whatsoever, see where it goes.

Spoiler: it didn't go anywhere. The story on HN is still here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700712

but the link is 404

https://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html

Drop the "Ideas." Just "Guy." It's cleaner.

you can buy ideas the same way you can buy expensive cars and bags. Centuries ago some rich europeans used to do that. Then we discovered 'merit'.

I cannot imagine not having far more ideas than I could possibly ever do. Today I was describing one to my partner and she told me the only reason I shouldn't do it is that I have too many other things to do.

The thing that makes me continually have ideas is the same thing that makes me not want to dedicate my life to implementing just one of them. It would be like picking a favourite child if I were producing offspring like a queen bee.

I think there is value in the effort to develop something and frequently implementing something well is worth as much and sometimes much more than just a simple proof of concept. Someone has to build the things, It should be the people who are good at that and feel rewarded by a job done well more than a job done differently.

I do think that there isn't enough perspective of the lives that other people lead that can cause odd side-effects. Some people keep their ideas secret, or overvalue the idea because it was the one they had. This is a perspective I find hard to relate to. Most of the creative people I know are much happier someone knowing about their creations. They're like grains of sand, each one with their own details and can be evaluated many different ways. A lot of intellectual property feels like watching a man jealously protecting their grain of sand while standing on a beach.

I believe that is why the intent of things like copyright is to not protect ideas themselves. You cannot copyright an idea, and as an ideas person (a rather horrid term) that feels appropriate. The thing that you have built around the idea is the valuable thing you have contributed to the world. I think that is why items that are copyrightable are referred to as work. The value you bring comes from the from the work you did, not the idea you had, ideas just come to you (often at inconvenient times).

Mass media causes a bit of an aberration because of this. The thing that makes someone wealthy from a popular work is not proportional to the work done to produce it or even the quality of the work. Works that can be easily reproduced and distributed receive a disproportionate reward to their quality. A median quality work in many fields can receive next to no reward. The most popular works receive a masssive reward. The mechanism allowing a control of supply to provide reward for work ends up influencing a supply demand curve that gives massive rewards to a very few and very little to the majority. There is still an element of merit to the successes, the popular things are popular for a reason, some of those things really are the best. The question is would they have still been the best if everyone who worked to create stuff were rewarded more linearly to quality, would that support enough development of ability and opportunity that the pool from which the best can be selected becomes much larger.

[this might have gone off topic, but obviously my brain has things that have to come out]