irony makes for greatness
why im learning to take myself less seriously
I feel that many of my best ideas are ironic. In my first year of college I competed in a pitch competition with what I thought was a genius idea. I spent weeks thinking of and perfecting the idea but I lost out to other pitches that I thought were stupid.
In spite of this, I decided the next year that I would make an ironic idea that would check all the judges boxes and follow mainstream startup wisdom. I set out to take the simplest possible idea and turn it into something that solves a very sentimental problem. That idea was ElderlyEats, and I made the entire initial idea and pitch in one quick evening. The next day, I won the $5000 and my brother later refined the idea and is now building it as a legitimate company [0]. Him and I have tried to kill the idea many times but it just continuously resonates with people and survives. To this day, it’s probably the best seed of an idea I’ve come up with.
The reason I think it worked is because thinking of it ironically allowed me to remove my ego and overthinking from the equation and just follow the flow of what I know exists in the world.
I also feel this when playing tennis. It feels that when I’m playing my most carefree kind of tennis, the kind that is joking and carefree, I am hitting my best shots. One reason this works is that I naturally spend too much time strategizing about things. To me, it’s easy to imagine that it takes an intense amount of focus and genius insight to get what I want, but in reality I’ve noticed that keeping things simple and finishing them to 100% is what gets me to something great.
Working on fun, simple and sometimes ironic ideas that can be executed quickly seems to be the key to performing at my highest level. Perhaps taking the simple idea 10x further is worth more than taking the complex ideas 0.1x as far.
[0] - Pitching the seed of an idea and bringing it into reality are two very different things. I take zero credit for all of the work and iterations that he has gone through to make it what it is today.
I enjoyed reading this writing. It's a good insight to realize that our ego is often the biggest enemy to progress.
My main takeaway is that your "irony" works well because of "familiarity". You can only play carefree tennis because you already know the court, your opponent, swing, and the game. Similarly, you could perhaps mock the startup world with ElderlyEats because you already understood the rules of the game.
You've found a way to turn a familiar playground into a space where you can just play instead of performing. That's your superpower - keep solving problems you know and care deeply, and the "irony" will keep working for you.
Dad