Was the pet rock Special and Important? Well, for whom? For its creator it was obviously both. For a few happy customers it was at least special. For society a

Was the pet rock Special and Important? Well, for whom? For its creator it was obviously both. For a few happy customers it was at least special. For society at large, who gives a shit? I think this would be a much clearer discussion if we defined "Special" and "Important" properly (and realized that they mean very different things to different people). There are a lot of people on HN/YC who are trying to hack together a successful internet company. For them, I don't think Matt's definitions of Special or Important are all that useful, because they ignore a lot of viable business ideas -- ideas that fill a niche which is inane by itself, but economically important to a few focused souls. If you make your living building Widget X, then no matter how trivial that widget is to its users lives, it is everything to the people who devote their lives/company to producing it. The better our economy evolves to allow niche ideas to make money, the harder time we're going to have figuring out how to define "Important". It is increasingly possible to earn a living doing something that's entirely trivial from a "big picture" point of view... but as soon as you're earning a living from it, it's become important (to you).