IDEAS ARE CHEAP

After my documentary premiere and a book signing in Chicago yesterday, a young man asked for a minute of my time. He had waited patiently until everyone in the line was gone before he came over. He builds beautiful guitars, the kind full of small details that only matter to the person making them. His question was simple: how do I get to where you have gotten in your career?

As people emptied the venue, we talked. For about twenty minutes I asked him specifics and tried to get a feel for what he knew and didn’t know about the basics of business. I ended by telling him what I tell everyone. I’ll tell you what I said, but not yet, because I found myself understanding more about my own answer as I talked it back through with a friend at dinner.

YOUR IDEAS ARE CHEAP

Every market has what is called supply and demand. Economists use these terms to explain why things do or do not sell, and I believe it applies just as well to other things we want to assess the value of.

Let me explain this in the simplest way possible:

You don’t buy sand at the beach. Not because sand is useless, but because there is more of it under your feet than anyone standing there could ever need. And because nobody needs it, it isn’t valuable. Supply and demand states that value does not come from something being useful — it comes from something being scarce. This is a universally understood rule, and also a reality that in my experience many creators, entrepreneurs and artists seem to miss.

A fact that most people don’t want to hear is that ideas have an infinite supply. They are the sand on the beach. They are not valuable. Just think for a moment. How many people do you know who always have endless ideas? Picture them. They talk about those ideas constantly and they rarely call any of them to action. I know you know someone like this. We all do. If ideas were actually valuable, these people would be rich.

The reality is that almost everyone has lots of ideas, usually good ones, but very few people actually do them. This is the uncomfortable truth of why some people make it and others don’t.

I’ll go further. For a lot of people, the ideas can be a hiding place. Talking about the idea feels like working on the idea, it costs nothing, it’s zero risk, and nobody can ever tell you it failed. The work is the part that can humiliate you. So we stay in the part that can’t.

When you are starting a business or trying to build a new thing, nobody will ever buy your ideas. They can’t. There’s no store for ideas. There’s no Shopify drop down link for that. People buy things that are real. Things that are scarce. Things that are in demand. They buy things that give them value and reward. Nobody buys the idea of a pair of Air Jordans. They buy the two shoes in the box and they take them home. The idea comes free with the purchase. You wear the shoes and the idea is included without a fuss or a premium.

The ideas that lead to valuable things aren’t underpriced. It’s just that they have no price at all.

In 1922, two sociologists named William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas published a paper with the title “Are Inventions Inevitable?” You should read it. They put together a list of 148 cases where the same invention showed up independently in more than one head at roughly the same time. Newton and Leibniz, calculus. Darwin and Wallace, natural selection. Scheele and Priestley, oxygen. Mendeleev and Meyer, the periodic table.

On February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for the telephone at the same patent office within hours of each other. People have argued about who really got there first ever since, and they are arguing about the wrong thing. Gray had the idea. Bell had the lawyers, the backers, and the company name. Only one of those realities is scarce.

The biologist Stuart Kauffman has a phrase for this — the adjacent possible. At any given moment only a few next steps of creativity are actually available, and everyone is standing in the same doorway looking into the same room. Every next great idea is right there, waiting to be seen by anyone who is looking hard enough. That’s why great ideas tend to arrive in pairs. Your idea isn’t just yours and it isn’t as special as you’d like to think. It’s just the next step that’s visible from where everyone happens to be standing. Air conditioning, the automobile, the smartphone. Each one looks obvious in hindsight because the pieces were clearly sitting there. How many times have you said “why didn’t I think of that?” It’s because you know you could have had that idea. Looking back, you can see the ingredients, and now you realize you just weren’t paying attention.

When Helen Keller was eleven, she wrote a short story called “The Frost King” and was accused of plagiarism over it. The accusation followed her for years. In 1903, Mark Twain wrote her a letter about it, and he was furious on her behalf. He told her that substantially all ideas are second hand, drawn from a million outside sources, and that the plagiarism charge was made by people who had never had an original thought of their own to lose.

If ideas were as scarce as some people believe, that list of 148 multiple inventions would be empty.

Which leaves a question. If the idea can show up in everybody’s head at the same time, what actually decides who is successful?

JOSH, WHY DID JHS WORK?

I can tell you immediately what I would not credit for my success. My ideas.

“But Josh, you have amazing ideas.” So do hundreds if not thousands of other people who make guitar pedals.

The circuits weren’t new. Most of them were older than I am. The entire pedal industry’s foundations were already more than fifty years old. Anybody could have built them, and plenty of people did before me.

In 1986 an economist at Berkeley named David Teece wrote a paper called Profiting from Technological Innovation. His finding is one of the most useful and least comfortable things I know: the person who invents the thing is usually not the person who makes money from it. The money goes to whoever owns what he called the complementary assets. Manufacturing. Distribution. Brand. The channel. The relationships. The trust.

I have always explained this as “first is not best,” but in a world of people obsessed with winning imaginary races of invention, that doesn’t always land so well.

I didn’t succeed on circuits. I didn’t succeed by making a revolutionary new pedal the world had never seen. I succeeded because year after year, while no one was looking, I was building things that were scarce. I made hundreds of videos. I answered emails from customers that most people would have deleted. I built a team of people around my weaknesses and empowered them to make my company better. I showed up to the small, boring things day after day while most people fixated on their ideas.

The success of my company is what happened as a result of that slow and unexciting work. Not the other way around.

JUST KEEP GOING

I have been asked that young man’s question hundreds of times, and my answer never changes. “Keep going, because everyone around you is going to stop.”

It’s simple math. Almost everyone gives up. The supply of people still working on the thing in year twelve is nearly zero, and that is the entire reason the ones still standing look extraordinary from the outside.

Walking back from dinner, I was with Brandon from Bilt Guitars, who builds my signature guitar. Bilt and JHS are about the same age, so we have been doing this alongside each other for about two decades without ever really comparing notes. I told him about the conversation inside. He said that whenever anybody asks him that question, his advice always seems to land on the same three words. Just keep going. He said it’s the only answer that makes any sense to him. I laughed and told him I have been saying that exact phrase for years, because just like Brandon, it’s the only answer that feels honest.

The truth is that I know people who kept going for twenty years and it did not compound. Doing the work is not a guarantee. Anyone who tells you that has confused their own luck with a law of physics. I can point to many times JHS was in the right place at the right time. I remember when a big artist or a massive piece of press fell into my lap. Success requires some luck, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I also know that luck walks right past the people who are sitting still.

Every day that you keep going, every day you keep making the thing, you buy one more chance for some luck that can change everything. Every day is another day to move one more step in the direction you feel you should go, toward a future you have no way of understanding yet.

HENDRIX NEVER SAW HENDRIX

Before he was a legend, Jimi Hendrix was a sideman for the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and King Curtis. He wore the fancy suits. He did what they said to do. They told him many times, don’t play so loud and stop showing off. He got fired more than once for being exactly what we now consider his genius.

Hendrix on the chitlin circuit, playing R&B licks at tiny roadside clubs, never once saw Hendrix at Woodstock.

He couldn’t have. Woodstock did not exist. Those amplifiers did not exist. Those songs did not exist. That audience did not exist. The version of our country that would need that version of the national anthem played to them on a Monday morning did not exist yet. None of it was in the room he was standing in.

Hendrix on that stage at Woodstock was never an idea.

Nobody sat in an office in 1964 and planned it. It was a series of steps that Hendrix said yes to. It was very likely in his head and his heart but it did not have a shape yet. There was no language to express it. It was an evolution that arrived, not an idea that was produced. Year after year, step after step, that Jimi Hendrix was being made. Not by his ideas, but by what he did with them.

Improv actors work like this. They work without a script and embrace a rule instead that says take what you’re handed and add to it. Never say no. Always say “yes, and.”

“Yes, and” is another way of saying just keep going.

WHAT I TOLD HIM

I told him his guitars look amazing. I told him he is already further along than I was at his age, which is true, and which I don’t think he believed.

Twenty years ago I was him. I was standing in front of people I thought had it figured out, asking versions of the same question, and what I was actually asking was whether I was allowed to keep going. Whether the thing in my head was good enough to justify the years it was going to cost me. I could feel the price I was going to need to pay. I just needed to know if it could be done.

Nobody can answer that for you. I couldn’t answer it for him.

I also want to say the part I didn’t say to him, because I was tired and the room was emptying out. Most of us are not going to be Paul McCartney, Flannery O’Connor or Ansel Adams, and that is a good thing. The thing you keep pressing into and saying yes to does not have to be a company. It can be a little book you write for your community. It can be a set of photographs nobody sees but your family. It can be a song you write for your kids. Make it. It will ripple out further than you will ever get to see.

So I gave him the only true thing I have. Keep going. Be ruthless about not stopping.

Yes, your ideas are good enough.

That was never the part that was going to decide your success.

If you enjoyed this, consider grabbing a copy of my new book Made On Earth For Rising Stars: The Story Of Electro-Harmonix. Every sale matters. It tells my publisher and distributer that people like you care about books like this. Also, my content here is always free, but if you subscribe with any payment, 100% goes to my local non-profit art center where we teach kids music and art for free. www.arthousegrandview.com