Why snobbery toward good ideas only works amid abundance

Snobbery toward good ideas is a luxury purchased with an abundance of them. Where good ideas are cheap and plentiful, refusing them saves the one scarce thing—years of attention—for an idea that might reorganize a field. Where good ideas are scarce, refusing them saves nothing. The disdain carries no value of its own; it borrows all of it from the surplus it is spoken into.

The clearest statement of the strategy is Alan Kay’s. “Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must work on great ideas, not good ones,” he told the audience at the 1982 Creative Think seminar, in a talk on metaphors and magnetic fields that closed with a section he labeled snobbery. Kay was then the central figure behind Xerox PARC’s personal-computing work, the inventor of Smalltalk and a principal designer of the Alto, and the line belongs to a specific theory of how breakthroughs happen.

A great idea works like a magnetic field: everything aligns with it the way iron filings arrange around a magnet. Find one, Kay argued, and the design designs itself. A “great idea” in his usage is a unifying conception with enough generative power to dictate everything downstream of it; a clever feature or a local optimization does not qualify. The personal computer as an expressive medium, the machine receding into the environment—each reorganized a field instead of improving a product. Against that standard, a “good idea” is anything that works and earns praise without changing the frame. The snobbery is a defense of finite attention. Good ideas are abundant and competent, and their competence is exactly the danger: they are plausible enough to absorb the years a great idea would have required. Kay names the way mediocrity wins: by being good enough.

The injunction also pays the listener a buried compliment. To be told to work only on great ideas assumes you’re capable of producing one, and most work does not even attempt the contribution the command takes for granted. Read as a lens, the maxim presses whoever holds it to ask whether a deeper and more powerful version of the idea in hand exists. Its value lies in that regulative use.

Taken as a literal selection rule, it fails, and it fails on Kay’s own evidence. Greatness is rarely legible in advance; it is a retrospective verdict, and the seedlings that become great are indistinguishable at planting from the ones that come to nothing. Kay’s breakthroughs grew out of borrowing and undirected play—Simula’s objects here, children’s learning there—none of which announced itself as great while he was absorbing it. Applied strictly, the command would have starved the soil that produced the very ideas it celebrates. The strongest objection: you cannot work only on great ideas because you cannot sort them from good ones until later, and the sorting machinery is the tinkering the maxim tells you to disdain. That tinkering runs on surplus: only where good ideas are plentiful can a person try many, drop most, and still be holding the rare one that turns out great.

A second limit is institutional: PARC manufactured the surplus. The snobbery was affordable there because someone else paid for it—lavish funding and a concentration of talent insulated from product deadlines. Detached from that setting and handed to an individual, the same counsel produces paralysis or a career of unfinished announcements. Survivorship bias underwrites the inspiration. Kay is remembered for the great ideas that landed; invisible behind him stand the many who chased great ideas instead of good ones and produced nothing, leaving no folklore. The maxim is advice from a winner about a strategy whose failures no one transcribes.

The dichotomy is also softer than its grammar admits. The phrase “not good ones” frames the two as alternatives, when in practice many great ideas are good ideas pursued past the point where others stopped. Object orientation was not handed down whole; it accumulated over years of revision. To treat good and great as a binary mistakes a developmental relationship for a categorical one, and that mistake is what makes the literal reading both quotable and wrong. Because great ideas grow out of good ones, a surplus of good ideas is the stock greatness is drawn from, and refusing most of them is safe only when enough remain to pursue.

The defensible version is narrow: let the live possibility of a great idea keep you from settling too early for a good one. It is a corrective for a culture already glutted with competent improvement, and only for such a culture. Turned loose in a domain that produces too few good ideas, the same disdain has nothing to work on and empties the room.