Combatting Shiny Object Syndrome
Shiny Object Syndrome official definition: the habit of getting distracted by new and exciting ideas, tools, or projects and abandoning your current work
Perhaps due to AI, there are too many opportunities and too much breakthrough innovation happening right now. Suppose there is a crowded indoor gymnasium of 500 people, the bleachers are full upon first glance, and each person is holding what appears to be a winning lottery ticket. You don’t really know who has the highest dollar ticket nor can you quickly sort them in value. But currently, you’re in the middle of the basketball court with a bicycle tire pump, breathing hard and pumping the handle to fill a half-deflated basketball with air. At the moment, it doesn’t really seem to matter which winning ticket is higher or lower in exact dollar value because they’re all ten thousand times more than what you think you’re holding. Whatever those people are doing is working (clearly) and whatever this is that you’re doing, pumping this ball I suppose, doesn’t seem to be working. But even if you allow yourself a pause to consider taking one of those tickets you can see, you’re too overwhelmed by the sheer truth that there are 500 of them in front of you to even decide on one to take. There is the restraint of a lingering suspicion that perhaps it’s not as easy as those people holding tickets make it seem. Perhaps they too felt the same way as you. So, you reluctantly decide to just keep pumping the deflated basketball, and only fantasize about having one of those winning tickets.
It’s not only about money, but everyone wants to be on the “cutting edge of things” where real change and results are.
This is exactly what shiny object syndrome feels like to a founder in the era of AI, especially one who has a technical background. And for myself personally building bicycle tools, even if it is innovative with strong product-market fit (PMF), it feels like stubbornly choosing to pump the basketball in the wake of billions and trillions of dollars moving between hands right now. It doesn’t just look and feel like that, I’m containing a literal dozen business ideas that on first dig would contain 1000x the amount of oil.
Entrepreneurs are all about “pivoting,” but truly what distinguishes a pivot from chasing a shiny object? One cannot claim a pivot is simply the transition from no PMF to having PMF, because going from mediocre PMF to exceptional PMF is a “valid pivot.” But what if that “exceptional PMF” you think you see from a pre-pivot perspective is simply that: the shiny object. You can’t afford to waste the time, effort, and resources you’ve put into your current PMF only to restart and find out the pivot wasn’t worth it. Of course, the difference between a good pivot and shiny object syndrome was whether you were right about throwing away your current PMF efforts for another.