Navigating the Idea Maze: A Founder's Guide to Success

How to chart your course through uncertainty and avoid entrepreneurial pitfalls

Meriwether Lewis made daily journal entries during the Lewis and Clark expedition. On February 13, 1805 suddenly he stopped writing.

When Lewis wrote his first journal entry after months of stopping, on April 7th, his record goes like this:

Their fleet consisted of six small canoes and two small boats. “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine,” Lewis wrote, “and these little vessels contain every article by which we were expected to subsist or defend ourselves.”

Ten years of planning went into getting their fleet together, but a lifetime of experiences prepared them for this moment.

The odds were against Lewis and Clark. Their imagination wandered through all the possibilities. Only now were they getting a glimpse of what could be. Lewis said, “I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”¹

Fueled by personal growth from dopamine, Lewis was faced with the idea maze he’d be leading the crew through for the two years.

What is the idea maze?

Jeff Bezos told Economic Club president David Rubenstein, “If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough. And they should be as high quality as I can make them. Warren Buffett says he’s good if he makes three good decisions a year.”

Bezo is firm in his belief that “as a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions.”² Your only role is to make these decisions. You must understand where you’re at in the idea maze and navigate it.

Ideas are not enough to be successful.

First you need to know how to recognize big ideas. Then you must execute on those. Execution is when you’ve entered the idea maze. You’ve become the man in the arena.

Balaji created the idea maze. He said, “good founders don’t just have ideas; they have a bird’s eye view of the idea maze.”³

You must know how to choose which paths to take and which paths to avoid.