@snowmaker I talk about this in "How to Do Great Work."
If you want to find a truly impactful idea, a good place to look is in the trash bin of history.
Most of the ideas that have most broken out in the last 5 years aren't new. They're old ideas that got written off too early.
examples: 1) AI: When Sam started OpenAI, saying "AGI" got you laughed at 2) Space: Elon started SpaceX after people had written off the 1960s-era dreams as sci-fi 3) Supersonic flight: Blake started Boom after everyone assumed Concorde already proved it couldn't work 4) Nuclear energy: fission and fusion are roaring back decades after ambitious people stopped studying nuclear physics 5) GLP-1's: After the fen-phen disaster, weight loss drugs were synonymous with snake oil.
There's a good reason this keeps happening. When a hyped idea fails, there's a backlash. It becomes embarrassing to work on - anyone still working on it is assumed too dumb to know better.
So, if you want to work on something like this, you have to teach yourself to feel the tinge of that embarrassment and push past it.
