Looking naive is a smaller risk than hedging every idea
Young people with large ideas get dismissed as naive, and many shrink their ideas to avoid it. Sometimes the dismissal is correct.
The young and the ambitious share a common risk: appearing naive.
Scott Belsky started Behance in 2006, a platform for creative professionals to show their work, and last year published Making Ideas Happen, a book about why so many creative ideas never get carried out. This line belongs to that concern. Young people and ambitious people propose things that sound implausible to those with more experience. The response is often a knowing smile, and the smile does damage: it teaches the person to trim ideas until they sound reasonable, which usually means until they are ordinary.
The fear of appearing naive is a strong force in organizations. A junior employee who suggests a large change risks looking as though they do not understand how things work. So they suggest small changes, or nothing. A young founder pitching investors learns to frame a bold plan in modest terms. Some of the ideas lost this way were naive. Some were right, and only looked naive because they ignored assumptions the experienced people had never tested.
Many successful companies were started by people who did not know what was supposed to be impossible. Michael Dell began selling computers from his university dormitory in 1984, when the established way was through retail stores. Experienced people in the industry thought direct sales of computers would not work. Dell’s inexperience let him try something they had ruled out.
The line has another side. Sometimes appearing naive means being naive. Napster’s young founders built a service in 1999 that let millions of people share music files, and they appeared not to take seriously the legal position of the record labels. The courts shut it down in 2001. The experienced people who warned them were right about the law, even if they were wrong about how much people wanted digital music.
The useful distinction is between naive about convention and naive about constraints. Conventions, such as how products are usually sold or who usually starts companies, are often worth ignoring. Constraints, such as laws, physics and cash, are not. A young founder who checks the constraints carefully can afford to look naive about everything else.