You Have a Great Idea? Here's 6 Reality Checks.

Successful singers, designers, writers, and entrepreneurs all have unproductive days, but a few successes make them stand out. They make a hundred mistakes in one field, rather than one mistake in a hundred fields. You only need to make one right choice to get rich, and you only need to get rich once. The impact of your decisions or ideas can be summed up in the following formula: Frequency * Quality = Impact

The impact can be increased by making more decisions or improving the quality of each decision. We humans are intellectually more akin to predators, such as lions, rather than cows. A lion waits for the perfect prey and concentrates all its energy to catch it, while a cow spends the entire day grazing grass. This article presents a framework aimed at increasing the quality of your decisions when it comes to picking a business idea to pursue.

1. Is It Universal?

Ask yourself if your idea is as relevant to someone in South Africa as it is to someone in North America. Universal businesses are robust because they rely on basic human needs and desires. Think of flooring shops, furniture manufacturers, transportation companies, and home builders. These types of businesses can thrive in almost any region. Everyone appreciates a hot cup of coffee on a cold day (Starbucks) or a cool drink on a hot day (Coca-Cola). No matter what the next big trend in AI is, we are still going to be licking ice creams, using condoms to have sex, and enjoying a morning cup of coffee. Find a universal idea and try to improve it marginally using your unique experiences.

2. Is It Boring?

Think about things that go unnoticed. Toilet paper, for example, is one of the most important innovations we use daily, yet it's rarely acknowledged. I hardly know any kid who dreams of making toilet paper when they grow up. Meanwhile, I know many teenagers who want to be AI developers, pilots, crypto billionaires, or investment bankers. While there is nothing wrong with these professions, their societal attractiveness draws everyone to them, making these occupations less appealing in terms of results. Find a boring business and take it seriously.

3. Is It Timeless?

Technology is often overhyped, and recognizing what's lasting is difficult. Tulips, railways, oil refineries, cars, the internet, and now AI all created hype. Being imaginative, people tend to overestimate the effects of a single technology. If you asked someone in the 1980s how they imagined the world in the 2020s, they would have said flying cars, UFOs, and teleportation machines. What do we have now? We have vaping teenagers and Zyn. Ask yourself if your idea would have been useful 100 years ago and if it will still be relevant 100 years from now. We hear about a few people who win big pursuing cutting-edge ideas like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. However, history is written by the victors. These people in the news represent less than 0.5% of those who tried those ideas. The 99.5% failures go unnoticed. Avoid fads and pursue timeless businesses.

4. Is It Simple?

Your idea should solve a single problem and be explained in one sentence that your grandmother can understand. In the modern age, we often see credibility and authenticity in complexity. If someone speaks in a language we don't understand and uses acronyms and domain-specific jargon, we assume they know what they're talking about. The opposite is true. If someone is a pro in a field, they can simplify whatever they are doing so a layperson can understand. Many people can sound smart, but few are. Furthermore, the business model around your idea should be so simple that it can be run by anyone who understands the basic principles you put in place. That makes your business fool-proof and gives it the ability to be run by anybody you hire. That is what you ideally want; otherwise, you'll be tied to that business forever. Go after businesses that are simple to understand and execute.

5. Is It Testable?

How easy is it to create a prototype and test your idea? Break your idea down into testable hypotheses and try to refute them instead of proving them. As Karl Popper writes in Conjectures and Refutations, all scientific ideas begin with conjectures, and only those bullet-proof to falsification withstand the test of time and become scientific theories. If you think starting a modular housing business is a good idea, try to prove it's not a good idea. If you have difficulty proving your idea is not good, then it must be a sound idea. If the first step requires patents or millions in marketing, it's probably not the right idea. If an idea is too expensive or time-consuming to be tested, it is worthless. You must be able to take immediate action and conduct small experiments before fully committing your capital, labor, and time to the idea.

6. Is It Scalable?

The goal of a business is ultimately to give you wealth. The best definition of wealth I have found is: "not being in a location you hate, at a time you don't want, doing what you don't like." Think of dentists, lawyers, personal chefs, and tailors. In these businesses, your reward is directly tied to the hours worked. A business is scalable if it can increase revenue or output without a corresponding rise in costs and efforts, typically by leveraging repeatable processes, automation, or economies of scale. Think of McDonald's franchise model. McDonald's made a brand and has been selling the trademark thousands of times and collecting royalty cheques. The same applies to manufacturing. A Tesla is designed once and produced thousands of times by setting up factory machines and robots. Outline a step-by-step process for creating your product or service and delivering it to customers, then identify which steps can be automated, streamlined, or outsourced to enhance the output without a proportional increase in costs.

By applying these six reality checks—universality, simplicity, timelessness, scalability, testability, and embracing the "boring"—you can increase the quality of your decisions and focus on ideas that have true potential for long-term success. The world is full of distractions, trends, and fleeting opportunities, but true wealth comes from building something that endures, solves real problems, and can be scaled effectively. As you navigate the journey of entrepreneurship, remember to think like a lion: be patient, deliberate, and focused on the right prey. It's not about chasing every opportunity—it's about catching the right one.