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Poor Superman. The guy can juggle battleships but he just can’t catch a break when it comes to technology.

First, there’s his job: Statistically, he doesn’t have one anymore, with newspapers folding faster than JLA members up against Doomsday. Sure, the Daily Planet is a big paper, comparable to the real-world New York Times, but they definitely can’t afford to keep that big globe. And I bet they’d can Jimmy Olsen, too, trading his photographic contributions for pictures stolen (“borrowed”) from social media.

These things aren’t cheap.

It’s probably for the best, though: That globe falls into the streets in every other issue. And Jimmy’s stuff was never much better than iPhone pictures, anyway. (He’s no Peter Parker.)

Speaking of iPhone pictures: How can Superman’s identity possibly hold up when everyone snaps a picture every time they see him? That’s not even getting into all the crazy facial recognition stuff that’s going on.

Can you imagine the TotallyLooksLike entry for Clark Kent and Superman?

“Damn, how’d they figure it out?”

If you’re looking for a new product idea for tech, just think of something that would make Superman’s life even more miserable, and you’re probably headed in the right direction.

I hopped on the bus the other day to head over to the Mission. A young man hopped on right behind me. Unlike me, however, he decided to forego paying, which the driver noticed and decided to address. The driver, a short angry man, yelled at the kid for a full three minutes before the kid finally caved to the immense social pressure of 20 angry pairs of eyes on him. He nonchalantly hopped off. Life went on.

I was mad at this stupid kid who managed to waste three minutes of my time. But then I considered the other people on the bus and realized he had wasted an hour of time– all of it spread across 20 people, frustrated and bored on a bus. What a jerk!

And then I realized web developers do this all the time.

The next time you skip adjusting that lightbox height, or forego styling that button element, remember the extra time your users are going to spend paying for your laziness.

There was a blog post today over on HeyWhipple by Luke Sullivan that claimed good, creative people are NEVER (caps his) bored.

I feel like the piece relies on a few misconceptions about boredom, and fuels a few other misconceptions which can be harmful to the creative process.

Boredom is not the same as having nothing to do

Here’s a typical IM conversation for me:

Me: I’m bored

Friend: Go find something to do! Live! Breathe in the world!

Me: I have something to do. I’ve been working on it for 5 hours. It’s boring work.

Me: That’s why I’m bored.

In an ideal world, we’d all have super-exciting stuff to do, all the time. In the real world, though, we have to wait in line at the grocery store, fill out tax forms, listen to our friends talk about their newborns, and do all kinds of other boring things.

Even the fun careers have boring bits. We often see only the fun parts because, well, that’s what’s interesting. Nobody tunes in to see Evil Knievel and his team running tests on handle grips.

If you’re sitting around with nothing to do and complaining about having nothing to do, then that’s a problem. And yeah, that’s probably boring too. But that’s not descriptive of all boredom.

Which brings me to my next point…

Doing nothing is just fine.

Relaxation and downtime are essential to the creative process. There’s this manic compulsion in society today to be doing something all the time. It was bad before Facebook and other social media, and now it’s gotten even worse.

“Sat on a bench and stared at a brick wall” doesn’t make for a great status update, but it’s a perfectly fine thing to do. So is sitting on the couch and absentmindedly flipping back and forth between Trading Spaces and Mythbusters.

Just don’t do it all the time.

Moderation is the key. That applies to the do something compulsion, too.

Burnout

The real problem with the constant do something compulsion: Burnout. Burnout is the creative’s worst enemy.

People who think they can’t get burned out haven’t pushed themselves hard enough. People who have suffered from it know to constantly walk the thin line between their productive peak and their burnout point.

This social expectation of creative people to do something and do something all the time is a recipe for burnout.

Plenty of young creative people hit their first burnout and just give up. The clash between social expectations and the reality of producing creative work is just too much. That’s something we should protect against, because a lot of these young creatives would have produced something truly great on their second, fifth, or twentieth try.

“Ideas are worthless.”

You’ll hear this everywhere across the tech/startup community and it’s wrong. Don’t say it. If you hear someone else saying it, politely ask them to stop saying it.

When it comes to ventures, ideas are like lottery tickets. The vast majority aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But there are exceptions. And then there are some very notable exceptions– exceptions that leave you jumping for joy on the couch and deciding which family members to leave out of your incoming fortune.

People who say ideas are worthless? They’re the same as the people who say, ”Everything that can be invented has already been invented.”

Ignore them. Then go invent, create, and execute. Fail if you have to. It’s one of the best ways to learn.

“But ideas don’t matter! Execution does.”

I get the intent behind this statement, but it seems to miss the fact that the fabric of execution is woven with ideas. Execution road is paved with idea bricks. The Sea of Execution is filled with idea fish.

You get the point.

Any successful business probably has hundreds of good ideas behind it– perhaps hundreds of ideas every day, if they’re a big enough operation.

Don’t write off the idea guy. Write off the guy who’s sitting on his ass, not doing anything with his idea. There is a difference.