That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea

by Marc Randolph

screaming the loudest. But they are the issues that, if you fix them, then all the rest will take care of itself.

But gone, also, were the scrappy underdog days. I missed them. I missed the late nights and early mornings, the lawn chairs and card tables. I missed the feeling of all hands on deck, and the expectation that every day you’d be working on a problem that wasn’t strictly tied to your job description.

We’d wander the aisles with clipboards, asking questions about how they felt about being able to return and rent movies at the grocery store. If they weren’t Netflix customers, we tried to convince them to sign up – and if they didn’t want to, we listened to their reasons why.

Sometimes you have to step back from your dream – especially when you think you’ve made it real. That’s when you can really see it. In my case, I left Netflix because I realized that the finished product of Netflix wasn’t my dream. My dream was building things. My dream was the process of making Netflix.

But I’ve come to realize that success is not defined by what a company accomplishes. Instead, I have a different definition: Success is what you accomplish.

(And to be fair to her, the idea as originally conceived wouldn’t have worked. It took years of adjustments, changes in strategy, new ideas, and plain old luck for us to land on a version of the idea that worked.)

The most powerful step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one: you just need to start.

The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it.

You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

But the great thing about having a dream is that you get to write your own story. You’re both the protagonist and the writer of your movie.

Everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea,” he said. “But it’s the people who get out of the shower, towel off, and do something about it that make the difference.