Your ideas are wrong (and your instincts aren't)

I've been reading Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company behind FarmVille.

Here are a few takeaways that I found fascinating:

1. Instincts and ideas are two different things. Your instincts are almost always right; your ideas are often wrong. Recognizing this distinction makes it much easier to abandon failing ideas without giving up on the core insight. Your instinct tells you where the market is going or which problems are worth solving. Your ideas represent specific ways of building a product or finding a solution. Ideas tend to be wrong because they involve countless permutations of details. Which brings us to:
2. Proven, better, new. When you follow an instinct, find the features that are proven to work in competing products and copy them. Identify which details in existing products you can objectively make better. Introducing new features or ways of interacting is risky. That's why:
3. A “minimum idea state” is much more useful than a “minimum viable product.” MVPs are too heavy. Instead, build just enough of your idea to rapidly gather data and test the waters.