Turning Eggs into Chicken

Ideas are powerful, but they are also fragile.

An egg supplies about 200 Calories, if you cook it and eat.

That energy is used to turn the albumen and yolk into a chick that is capable of cracking the shell and exiting it. Some heat arrives externally from the hen as well. Eggs need to be maintained at about 37.8 degrees to incubate. The colder the environment, the more the hen needs to supply energy. All that energy turns the egg into a chicken.

How easy it is to crack an egg; and how much harder it is to kill a chicken?

An idea is like the egg, fragile, often easy to trample over. The details are not clear, nothing is fully formed. It is easy to rubbish it. And if the conviction behind the idea is not strong enough, it often falls apart.

I once spoke to an entrepreneur who was seeking to build a startup. He pitched me his idea and as I sat around poking holes, he was moved to tears and left. He eventually decided not to pursue that idea at all!

Since then I have made it a point to tell any founder that speaks to me -

It is not hard to say something will not work. A beggar sitting on the corner of the road can tell you something will not work, it takes no effort. Pointing out flaws is a way to question things that you may not have thought through. Even so, the genius is not is saying something won’t work. The genius is in making it work. It is in figuring out how.

So while I might tell you something is not going to work; I might be no different than the guy who told Wilber and Oliver Wright that a canvas draped on a wooden frame will not fly. The genius was in making it fly!

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Once you take an idea and give it form, breathe life into it, it becomes far more difficult to trample over it. It has a form and often it is easier to see what it CAN be. One’s inability to communicate what they envision in their mind should not limit their vision.

At the same time, much like the egg, it takes a lot of energy, effort and time from the founder to turn the idea into a business. So pour your energy and time into it. Keep chiselling at it, define it more and keep asking people what they think.

Turn your egg into a chicken.