Counter
Three times in two weeks now, we’ve read or listened to someone talk about running counter to prevailing wisdom.
First, it was venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz on his blog:
“The opposite of a good idea is a good idea”
then it was Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario on the Uncensored CMO podcast:
“Most new things are really just copies of existing things. If you really want to get to truly unique or innovative, you really have to trick your brain to think of a bad idea or a dumb idea.”
And related to these quotes was third, last week, from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:
“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”
Huang, whose company is powering basically all of the consumer Generative AI stuff out there, continued to say that people with very high expectations have “very low resilience.”
The through-line here, of course, is that something bad ideas don’t turn into good ideas immediately. They take time, and they take a commitment to execution.
So as much as Tunguz/Cessario are referencing product and brand building, that advice also relates to execution: Testing different/counterintuitive category positions, product designs, channels for distribution and advertising.
Often, as we test anything, we fall in love with our ideas, dreaming of the best possible outcomes. It seems the point of the above quotes is that, when we do this, we grossly underestimate both the difficulty of the task at hand and, therefore, overestimate the near-term best-case scenario.
Interestingly, though, this mindset also underestimates the long-term best-case scenario.
If that’s the case, expecting less does, in fact, become an advantage. Just don’t expect much from it.