Recommendations (and thoughts about those recommendations)
If you write something for a blog, don’t get feedback on it. This doesn’t apply if you’re writing a policy proposal or a master’s thesis or something you think people will actually take really seriously (or chide you if there’s some big and obvious mistake). But for blog posts, it’s more fun to be wrong in interesting ways, and I think it can be useful to throw out lots of very half-baked ideas and see if you come up with anything useful while you’re at it.
Coworking spaces have two big classes of problems. Number one, they are a band-pass filter. Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.
If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you’re in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It’s true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too.
