There's a story about someone telling Einstein that he keeps a notebook on hand to jot down all the good ideas he's had. Einstein said he wouldn't need such a n

There's a story about someone telling Einstein that he keeps a notebook on hand to jot down all the good ideas he's had. Einstein said he wouldn't need such a notebook. Because he has such a great memory? No, because he'd only had one or two good ideas in his life. Seriously, if none of them leap at you, grab you by the neck, and insist on existing, it means you don't have any good ideas. But this doesn't mean you should be discouraged, it just means you should be in "getting good ideas" mode. And the best way to do this is to get out there, experiencing problems, solving them, making mistakes, correctly them, feeling stupid, making progress, all the while trying to understand things, wondering about things, being exposed to lots of different ideas from different places, and trying out the ideas you've had, if they interest you, just out of curiosity. Get busy living or get busy dying in Morgan Freeman's voice. "Evaluating ideas" is a way of dying, IMHO. At least, that's how it's been for me when I've got stuck in that way of thinking, anyway. Then one day, you're looking at something, and you think "you know, everyone is doing this in a stupid way. why don't they do it this way? it would be so much better." You whip up the simplest prototype you can think of, in a couple of hours, just to check for yourself that the basic idea does basically kinda work. Then you whip up something, in a day, that others could try (a day's work: that's how incomplete and limited and trivial that prototype should be - an MVP), to see if anyone else is the slightest bit interested - if they are, that gives you the information and the encouragement/fuel to continue. And suddenly, without quite meaning to, your journey has begun. That's what happened to me, anyway. Take the heaviness away. That corporate/academic/executive approach of "criteria" and "evaluating ideas" doesn't make giant corporations agile - and it's only going to drag you down. Insight and intuition come not from methodologies, but in spite of them; they come from contact with reality, and from you. And insight and intuition is where the great startup ideas come from. disclaimer I'm not a wildly successful entrepreneur, just a successful-enough one. A cool idea from many years ago is still making money for me today. This is all just IMHO, my experience, YMMV.