Concept Distillery

A fine idea should be aged. We all love a spicy opinion or hot take. But crossing lines is an art – one that I’ve begun to deeply appreciate. It’s easy to be a contrarian. It’s difficult to be a popular one. 

Fresh ideas are violent. If yours flies the roost too soon, it’s going to have a rough landing. Your audience won’t like it. Rookies blame other people for “not getting it”, when they should do the opposite. The culture of your listeners, readers, or clients creates the rules of the game.

Last Friday, I left blistering Bangkok after a work trip. On my flight home to Cascadia, I watched Inception. I think it’s a great movie. In part, I’m sure, because I was once told that I look like a “more handsome” Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That was a bizarre (and incorrect) compliment, but it stuck with me. Regardless, the combination of music, aesthetics, action, and mind-bending make Inception a top-notch way to kill time on a 14 hour flight.

One principle in the movie’s fictitious world is that the act of inception – planting an idea in someone’s head without them knowing – only works under specific conditions. That germ of a thought needs to be, in the words of Hamilton Helmer, “simple but not simplistic.” Simple enough to fly under the radar of consciousness, but rich enough to generate new patterns of behavior.

Inception, the movie, is a cartoony representation of the job of a marketer, consultant, or state-sponsored TikTok channel. Their goals differ, but the method is the same: change someone’s mind. This could be a small shift, or an ambitious 180° turn. The target could be one person or billions. Fortunately, we don’t have tech to precisely implant new ideas into our psyches (algorithms are close, but messy).

For now, we rely on manual forms of inception. An overlooked part of this process is socializing ideas. My aunt introduced me to this term, who heard it from a lobbyist. It’s not new, but I found it new, and it made a lot of sense. People take a long time to warm up to fresh ideas; to shift their Overton window. A fresh concept needs to be presented and tweaked hundreds of times before it becomes sticky.

(I just spent a month at Edge City Lanna, a pop-up city with a ton of brilliant people. One of my goals there was to socialize an idea. SoP and 0xPARC are developing a tool for thought, based on two years of protocol research. One month at Lanna was like six months of regular idea maturation.)

Young ideas are truly like kids (or puppies, if you’re not a kid person). You can’t leave them alone in the world. They can be annoying, if not cruel. They go through their own anklebiter stage. The homeschooled ones can be kind of… weird. Immersion in society is a prerequisite for success. Poorly socialized ideas trigger alarm bells wherever they go. Aging ideas is not like aging wine. Don’t lock your ideas, children, and puppies in a dank cellar.

Convincing people of something takes forever. If you’re selling Post-It Notes, that’s straightforward pitch. If you’re selling Bugattis, you could start planting that idea – Bugattis are sexy – well before someone has the power to purchase one. If you’re selling a vision for a new city, a policy to protect small forest landowners, or a new philosophy? It takes time to figure out how to package these things.

In the first few cycles of an idea, you’re not going to sell many people. You might get a couple strays who bought into your charisma or saw a glimmer of something powerful. But you’re not gonna win the popular vote. Which is, whether you like it or not, part of the game. A good idea that isn’t popular is not a good idea. The first cycles are about socializing an idea. You watch reactions, get feedback, change aesthetics, fix language, identify enemies, etc.

Most of the benefits of idea socialization come from removing an idea’s weak points or thorns. Things that people get hung up on are things that need to be fixed. It’s not your audience that needs fixing. Jerry Seinfeld, speaking about jokes, says that it’s the comedian's job to adapt to the culture. If you’re in the business of ideas, culture is nothing more than rules of the game. It’s a dynamic set of rules, but it takes a long time to change – far longer than the average lifespan of an idea.

Of course, the central point of an idea can’t be abandoned in the process of socialization. Otherwise you’d just turn into a parrot. Strip away the high-friction bits, keep the core intact. Taking an idea public doesn’t guarantee it’ll turn into something good, but it will greatly reduce the risk of it being bad.

“They might not like what I have to say, but they like how I say it.”

- Tom Goodwin

Socializing ideas helps them mature faster. The other, more direct effect is familiarity. It’s also more of a double-edged sword. Familiarity is not equivalent to popularity, and a negative reputation can forever change the trajectory of an idea. Public perceptions about the validity of blockchain technology were shaped by early use cases for cryptocurrencies. On the plus side, notoriety can spark conversations that will ultimately lead to more rapid improvement of an idea. 

The idea business is a capital-intensive industry, like forestry or nuclear energy. Lobbyists, consultancies, and advertising agencies spend huge amounts of time socializing ideas to gain an edge in the long run. It’s the right way to go about it. The listener is always right.

Socialization moves an idea towards the gold standard of inception: simple, but not simplistic.