Last year I was on a flight and the in-flight entertainment switched after the movie to some other types of shows. One of them was around interesting engineering feats and had a feature on a submersible car. It could basically drive into water and then navigate as a submarine (shallow depth naturally) under the water.
A few rows ahead of us I heard a woman turn to her friend and exclaim "hey, I thought of that!"
This betrays, I think, a common propensity to value an idea over execution. Or at least to underestimate the challenges in the execution. Imagine all of the myriad engineering challenges that had to be overcome in order to execute on this idea of a submersible car. And then someone tries to sum it up with "I thought of that too".
For me this story embodies the increasingly common maxim for the entrepreneur that it is the execution that matters. To share your idea. Get feedback. That everyone else has their own ideas. And if somebody pulls off something that you had thought of but didn't execute on - be impressed with them, not with yourself for having the idea too.
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