I don't know. I'd argue with that: I think that the ability to have a good idea is one that some people lack to some degree, and it's one that's more valuable than any ability to execute.
The concept I had for my web site hatched about two years ago. I delayed on taking it and using it for that time because I was CERTAIN that somebody at one of the huge sites in the field would have implemented something like that. From my point of view, the problem was immense and there was only a single solution. Since then, demoing my concept pages to various people in the field, I've come to realize that while people can INSTANTLY grasp why the idea works, nobody even attempted to make the same logical approach to the problem as I did.
I think you see this contrast best with Jobs and Wozniak, and with the people who say that Jobs would have been nothing at all without Woz, that he was just a marketer. Strictly speaking, that's true, because Jobs needed somebody else to implement his ideas. However, looking at Jobs' career, that's always been the case. He didn't build NeXT himself: he got people to build it for him. Ditto the iPod, or the iTunes music store, or the iPhone, all of which were things that he purportedly conceptualized himself. I think that his career demonstrates that while Woz was the essential to creating Jobs' concept, that the idealist who came up with the ideas to begin with is the one whose talent is rarest and most valuable.
The concept I had for my web site hatched about two years ago. I delayed on taking it and using it for that time because I was CERTAIN that somebody at one of the huge sites in the field would have implemented something like that. From my point of view, the problem was immense and there was only a single solution. Since then, demoing my concept pages to various people in the field, I've come to realize that while people can INSTANTLY grasp why the idea works, nobody even attempted to make the same logical approach to the problem as I did.
I think you see this contrast best with Jobs and Wozniak, and with the people who say that Jobs would have been nothing at all without Woz, that he was just a marketer. Strictly speaking, that's true, because Jobs needed somebody else to implement his ideas. However, looking at Jobs' career, that's always been the case. He didn't build NeXT himself: he got people to build it for him. Ditto the iPod, or the iTunes music store, or the iPhone, all of which were things that he purportedly conceptualized himself. I think that his career demonstrates that while Woz was the essential to creating Jobs' concept, that the idealist who came up with the ideas to begin with is the one whose talent is rarest and most valuable.