During my trip to my hometown last week, I visited one of my childhood friends who recently got married.
We started talking about how working 9-5 at a job you hate is one of the worst ways to spend your days, and how we couldn’t believe this way of living has become the norm all over the world.
It’s not the lack of ideas or dreams, but you need the money, you don’t have the time or energy to focus on anything else after work, and that sort of thing.
While working at a logistics company about 3 years ago, he’d observed that drivers were constantly stealing fuel, and had this idea to detect theft by measuring the fuel level in the tank by minute, sending the data to an app in real time, and save the company a lot of money.
He’d pitched the idea to a couple of people, including myself.
We’d briefly discussed how he could go about it, and never talked about it again until now.
Fast forward 3 years and 4 companies, here we are complaining about his new boss and how it’s impossible for him to escape the rat race now that he’s married and has other responsibilities than himself.
I ask him what happened to that idea and why he’s not pursuing it.
Looking like he lost all his self-belief and confidence, he says it was a stupid idea from the beginning, and blames himself for even thinking about it.
I ask why he feels that way, and it turns out that he spoke to a distant relative of his, who has no more expertise on the topic than a random person passing the street, but somehow was able to convince him out of giving it a shot.
He says “The fuel tank would explode with an electronic device in it.”
This could be a fair point, but also very assuming and limiting as it jumps into the conclusion that he has to use a specific electronic device that causes a reaction when in contact with fuel.
I ask if there are other ways to implement it, and he says he never really thought about it.
Just like that, he gave up on the idea that once gave him a lot of excitement and hope as his ticket to a dream life.
Only because some random dude said he can’t do it and made him feel stupid.
Out of curiosity, I started doing some research on the spot to see if this is a real problem, and in what ways it could be solved.
Sure enough, there were many different solutions that could be implemented, without causing the fuel tank to explode.
I picked one that uses ultrasonic sensors, and continued the conversation asking for a step by step guide to implement it with diagrams, code snippets, estimated cost to build such a system, links to the materials needed and so on.
Seeing that there’s more progress in 10 minutes of research than he made in 3 years, all thanks to just taking the first step, he gets interested and asks if there are any companies already doing this.
Turns out there are many companies that solve the exact same problem and sell it in the exact same way as he imagined, which is great news.
There is an established market, and there are ways for him to improve the existing solutions to grab a piece of that market.
A spark of hope reignites in him, and it all feels doable again.
He has mixed feelings; angry because the guy who said he can’t do it delayed him by 3 years, happy because he had a good idea that can actually become a business, and scared because now he has to do something about it.
He can’t blame that distant relative anymore, or any other person, as he’s the only one that stands in his way.
Now, a little conversation with ChatGPT is far away from actually building the product, and he already starts talking about the future problems that are not real yet.
I tell him that he doesn’t have all the answers now, and that’s a part of the process.
He will figure it out as he goes.
But he doesn’t seem so sure.
In the end, I don’t know if he will pursue the idea.
Because this time, it looks almost as if he’s trying to convince himself that he can’t do it.
But it doesn’t matter what I think.
The only thing that matters is what he does about it.
We’ll see how that turns out, maybe I’ll make another video sharing his story.
But the moral of this one is that people will try to drag you down and tell you that you can’t.
Well guess what, you are the only one who can decide that.
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