Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke I enjoy (not original to him):
Two gentile businessmen meet on the street. One of them says “How’s business?” The other says “Great!”
I like this joke because of how much lifting is done by the negative space around the joke vs. the joke itself. It also reminds me of my own experience as a startup founder listening to other startup founders talk.
I try not to be overly careful about starting projects in the “right” place. Here’s my pitch for doing the same:
Starting where you are most interested makes you more likely to start at all. This provides the motivation to get you over a project’s activation energy. For your personal projects in particular, motivation to just start the thing is more important that having a careful roadmap. The same applies in a workplace context to get a new initiative over organizational inertia.