Leaders and successful entrepreneurs often say, “The idea isn’t important”. However, a couple of years ago, I watched a lecture by Sam Altman, where he spoke about startup ideas. He said that he too thought this before, but now had changed his mind. The motivation behind this was, partly, that when you have decided to work on your new business, you will probably do that for a long time. So, it would be a waste of time to work on a business or project for years if it was the “wrong idea”.
You could, of course, counter-argument and say, “Yes, but if you come with a new idea, you could just go and build that business instead”, but the reality is often more complicated. You might have invested a lot of money, and you have a responsibility to customers, investors, co-workers, etc.
I have in my (so far very short) carrier, taken some bad decisions, and almost all of the major once have been correlated to long-term agreements, contracts, or similar. For example, my business and I signed a client for 1-year but realized soon that the service we offered wasn’t what we should offer. We had the “wrong idea” of what our service should look like, and now we were obligated to keep delivering it for one whole year. It would have been much better to keep the contract on a 1-month basis so we could have swapped over to the new “good idea” quicker.
So, until you know that this is the idea you really want to realize (you should find a way to validate that), you probably want to keep your current plans, projects, and work as agile as possible. Don’t make any commitments to lengthy contracts, agreements, or similar. You want to be able to switch tracks if needed. At least, this is what I wished I had realized a couple of years ago.