What a good post.<p>This reminds me of something I used to think in my creative writing classes: you're a real writer when you're prepared to say "this is how bad I suck", and put your work out there anyway. I met so many people who called themselves "writers", but if I asked to read something they'd written, they hadn't produced a single complete work they'd call their best effort.<p>Once you really put it out there, for all to see, you have to let go of your fantasy about how great you are and confront the reality that this really does represent you as a writer.<p>It's so similar with code and programmers. There are so many people who like talking about what it means to be a programmer, what it means to write code... but you aren't a real programmer until you put something out there, warts and all, and say "yep, this is my work, for better and for worse."
Basically, it doesn't matter what direction you're going when you try to climb the hill; it just matters that you're <i>building momentum</i>. Once you've got that, anyone (a VC, for instance) can point you in the right direction, and you'll be an instant success; without it, even the best idea will get slogged in a Sisyphean cycle of bad implementations.
um...bad ideas isn't one big contiguous space. there are good bad ideas and bad bad ideas.
good bad ideas are those where you are trying to solve a problem or do something fun, but your execution isn't that great.
bad bad ideas are those that invent a problem that doesn't exist and then solve it (watch infomercials).