I’ve found recently that I’ve been a bit hesitant to take on new projects, especially of the interesting variety, largely out of a fear that I’m doing something unoriginal. As anyone who has spent any substantial amount of time in the markets will tell you, being second to an idea isn’t necessarily terrible, but being 50th generally is, and I’d really rather avoid being 50th whenever possible. How do you guarantee, or at least maximize the odds, that whatever you’re doing, you’re the first?

It seems there are actually a few good rules of thumb to this.

First and foremost, people have lives. They only have so much time they can give a project, and the more time a project takes up, the more likely they’ll either decide not to take it on, or that they’ll run out of time and not come back to it later.

The same goes for difficulty. While I wouldn’t say that people, by their nature, are lazy, I would say that evolution has favored this behavioral pattern where people tend to be less likely to do things that are more difficult, or involve a greater number of steps. As a result, the greater the degree of difficulty an endeavor requires, or the greater the number of steps, the less likely that someone has done it, or that they’ve finished after starting.

Next, obscurity. I don’t think it should come as much of a surprise that the more obscure the thing that you’re thinking of doing, the lower the likelihood that someone has stumbled on it and done it.

Finally, there seems to be this fourth factor combining obscurity and the number of steps in cases of progressive dependency, where later steps require previous steps to be completed to even be discovered. Say one in 10 people in your industry will stumble on whatever idea you happen to have first. Then maybe one in 10 people who complete the step following the first idea will discover the second idea, and then one in 10 of those who complete the second will also discover the third. It stands to reason that the more steps your project requires, the less likely it is that someone else will have stumbled on all of them.

So if you want to truly do something that no one has done before, do something obscure, do something time-consuming, do something difficult, and do something that has unknowns you’ll only resolve once you complete the first bits. The more of these your project involves, the lower the number of people who will have done it. Enough, and it’s probably fairly likely you’ll be the first.