Are your ideas worth anything? And what about the age of AI?

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I’ve spoken to several millionaires recently and here are some things to pounder upon.

Your ideas aren’t worth a dime. Anyone with eyes in their head and ears on the sides can dream up so many ideas, they could practically feed a bunch of monkeys on them. All that talk about YC and Shark Tank, all those interviews and investments — they’re not about the idea you want to pitch. The real question is whether you can make that idea work. Do you have a burr under your saddle big enough to see it through? It doesn’t matter if it’s an AI startup that helps the blind see or some trash-recycling project in your village.

Clean code, architecture, projects, languages, frameworks — all of that goes under “miscellaneous.” The real question is: how much money will they spend on you, and how much profit will it bring? If the numbers add up, you’re everyone’s darling, with a green light and a red carpet. If the numbers show a loss, the light goes red, and your final mile turns green.

You’ve got to know how to sell — anything and everything. The one who can sell gets the money. It’s been that way forever: you might be the best at what you do, but if you hide in your little hole, you’ll be eating scraps. You have to stand out. Doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber, a programmer, or a manager — you have to sell your work or convince the higher-ups that you need more money for the project. Without that, you’re going nowhere.

I don’t know about the younger folks reading this, but back in my school days, they taught us the exact opposite about everything. Selling was considered shameful — like something only old ladies at the market would do. You were supposed to mind your job and keep your head down. “Always come up with new ideas; maybe you’ll be the next Bill Gates.” Yeah, right. No thanks. The guy ended up going senile and blowing his money on who knows what. Sure, the accusations about him being a reptilian who snacks on kittens every morning are a stretch, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire — people who never blow their investments don’t get painted in a bad light.

So what am I getting at?

When someone tells you life is crappy, don’t believe it. Five centuries ago, you had to haggle for your life with slave traders. A thousand years ago — with kings. Two thousand years ago — with pharaohs. And with every century you go back, the bargaining got tougher.

Nowadays, in most countries, you can’t even starve to death if you try. Now you’ve got to haggle for a life that actually makes you happy. It’s hard, but not impossible. They told us we need to know a bunch of programming languages for a good life. In reality, that’s not quite it. To live well, you need to do the same stuff people have been doing for ten thousand years — just do it in 2025, not 1025. So we sit, watch, and see how it goes.