The only feeling worse than "Why didn't I think of that?" is "I thought of that, but didn't do anything about it!"
The only feeling worse than "Why didn't I think of that?" is "I thought of that, but didn't do anything about it!"
More commonly it goes "I thought of that, my friends thought of that, some dude I met at a bus stop thought of that, but none of us had access to 100M in venture capital to do anything about it. But the guy that did is a business genius and we all owe them our respect and admiration."
My worst feeling is "I tried that two years ago but couldn't get enough people interested, so I dropped it..."
AKA, I wasn't rich enough to successfully market it.
Personally I think the feeling of wet socks trumps both of these, but we're all different.
I had the idea for WeWork years before Adam ever bought his first office. But I don't have the type of personality to inspire a cult, and my father-in-law didn't gift us a million dollars when I got married.
I literally pitched this idea in an MBA course in 2009. It got shot down pretty hard. To think, with a little encouragement and seed funding, I too could have been a professional maniac.
How about "Ooo, that's a good idea" "oh, someone else thought of that thirty years ago and it went nowhere"
Naw, even worse is thinking of something, creating a prototype, using one of the patent help services and not hearing anything back until a few years later when you see a commercial for your idea.
ADHD is doing that every single fucking day, and taking prescriptions that sorta help with it sometimes, but also have a lot of extremely irritating and frustrating side effects for a lot of people.
My team and I built an automated restaurant management/ordering system that used touch screens as my senior project in college, way before they were a big thing (we put lcds into a table and used one of those things you put over the screen to make them touchable).
After college, none of us continued working on it.
actually me way back in high school. i had heard about bitcoin and went "ooh what an interesting way to make money" set up the miner and opened a wallet and everything, never mined and forgot about it. fast forward to the crypto boom 10 years later and i was sad
Which will be our reaction when climate change goes past a certain point.
I've thought of an improvement to an existing product, but don't have the thousands of dollars to try an patent it, or start selling it in it's improved fashion. It sucks, cause it would be nice to have and I think a lot of people would want to buy it.
Once I thought and did the thing then realized the thought was the thing to do and then it kept going and going and...
"I thought of that, but not enough to act on it!"
FOMO is a bitch