BEHAVIOUR 10 OF 10 . LETTING GO
How do I know when to let an idea go?
When you notice you are defending it rather than improving it. Holding on does not only cost you that idea. It hides the better one standing right behind it. The good ones arrive after the obvious one has been released, and that order almost never changes.
Letting go is a behaviour, not a mood
Think, do, be. Nobody can teach you a technique for this, because the moment you need it you will not be in a mood to run a technique. You will be attached, slightly defensive, and quietly certain you are right.
So it has to be something you are rather than something you do. And it is the last of the ten for a reason. Curiosity opens you at the start. Letting Go is what keeps you open at the end, when you have something to lose.
The behaviour, in one line: the best ideas are yet to come. Not as consolation. As a description of how this actually works.
What it looks like when it’s missing
Somebody with one idea, three years old, still in the deck.
Every meeting is a defence. Every note is an attack. The idea has stopped being a proposal and become a position, and the person holding it has stopped listening to the market because the market keeps saying the wrong thing.
The cruel part is that it does not feel like stubbornness from the inside. It feels like conviction, which is a virtue, and like persistence, which is another one. That is why this one is so hard to spot in yourself and so obvious in everybody else.
Where this came from
The same Dido insight tour that gave me Mumbai gave me something else, and I turned it into a company.
The insight was that women soundtrack their lives. They build playlists around moods, moments and activities. Music to chill to, music to be angry to, music to drive to, music to run to. Not a genre, not an artist. A moment.
So we built it. Music2-2.com launched in February 2008 with fifteen women. Mischief in San Francisco. Ellinor in Sweden. Stephanie in Paris. Hayley in New York. Within days they were blogging, uploading photos, making playlists for each other and arguing about Cat Power. By that September the site had carried one marriage, one engagement, sixteen festivals and a woman in Berlin writing something true about being lonely, underneath a playlist.
For context on the timing: Spotify’s public launch was October 2008, and it did not reach the UK, where I was, until February 2009.
Then I took it out to find a partner, and the answer was no.
So I let it go and went to the next thing.
Which is the part most people get wrong about me
I was never going to become a funded startup entrepreneur. That was never the play.
My talent is zero to one. Make real what does not exist. Find the insight, build the thing, show the possibility, present it. That is the part I am for, and I know it now well enough to say it plainly.
The bit after that, running a company for ten years, raising the round, hiring the fortieth person, is a completely different talent held by completely different people. Confusing the two is the most expensive mistake an ideas person can make, because the ten years you spend running something you are not built to run are the ten years you do not spend making the next fifteen things real.
That is not giving up at the first hurdle. Music2 ran for a year with real people living in it, and I took it to market properly. It is knowing which of the six steps you are for.
Everybody leans toward one part of the process. Scoping the right problem, finding the insight, sparking the idea, testing it, building it, or selling it. Find yours and you stop apologising for the ones that are not.
I was right about playlists and I did not get to own them. Both of those things are true and only one of them ever mattered.
What the evidence says
Your first good idea physically blocks your better one. This is called the Einstellung effect, and the demonstration is brutal. Sheridan and Reingold (PLOS ONE, 2013) gave chess players positions containing a familiar, decent, but suboptimal move, with a better move available elsewhere on the board. The players who took the familiar move kept looking at it for the whole trial. Their eyes never left it, while they believed they were searching the board for alternatives.
The experts who found the better move were the ones who gradually disengaged their attention from the familiar one.
Sit with that. It is not that you weigh up the first idea and choose it. It is that while you are holding it, you cannot see the other one, and you will sincerely tell people you looked.
And the good ones come later. Reliably. Beaty and Silvia (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2012) describe the serial order effect as one of the oldest and most robust findings in creativity research: later responses in an ideas task are more original than earlier ones. Their own study points at executive processes, the strategic retrieval and reworking of what you know, rather than ideas simply drifting outward on their own.
Which means originality is not a lightning strike. It is what is left after you have let go of the first several answers, and it is the reason a session that ends when somebody says something workable ends too early.
Put the two together and you have the whole behaviour. The first answer blocks the best one, you cannot feel it happening, and the best one only shows up after you release the first. Letting go is not grace. It is the mechanism.
What to do on Monday
Take the idea you are most attached to right now.
Write down, in one plain sentence, the truth about people underneath it. Not the idea. The truth it rests on.
If you can write it, you are safe. The idea can change shape three times and you will still be holding the thing that matters, and you will be able to let the current version go without losing anything.
If you cannot write it, that is the answer. What you are defending is the idea itself, and it is blocking your view.
Letting Go is behaviour ten of ten. It sits with Tuning-in and +1 in Module 4, Deepening Your Inner Creativity, and it closes the ten week program, because by then you will have made something you are attached to.
Sources
- Sheridan, H., & Reingold, E. M. (2013). The mechanisms and boundary conditions of the Einstellung effect in chess: evidence from eye movements. PLOS ONE, 8(10), e75796. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0075796
- Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J. (2012). Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(4), 309-319. doi:10.1037/a0029171
- Spotify timeline: founded 23 April 2006, public launch 7 October 2008 (Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Spain), United Kingdom 10 February 2009.
- Primary source for Music2-2.com: the MUSIC 2 INNOVATE 2 deck, IndustryApproved Ltd, dated September 2008.