Square Pants

“What the f#*$ are carrot jeans?” I asked myself while looking online recently.

Ah I get it. I guess they look like these.

They make your legs look like carrots. Huh.

Reminds me of something.

About 15 years ago I was sitting around a dorm room chatting with a friend of mine about a concept.

Why can’t pants be square?

If you can’t imagine what I’m talking about, let me explain.

Pants traditionally make your legs look a lot like cylinders. That’s because the material wraps around your leg in a circle. But who’s to say it can’t be a square.

What if you could wear pants that made your legs look a bit more like Gumby? (Spongebob wasn’t a thing anyone knew about yet.)

I loved the idea. I thought about it constantly and talked to everyone I knew about it.

I remember telling a friend of my mother’s who’s awesome at sewing. She listened to the concept and laughed. But she did throw out some ideas on how maybe we could use things like material glue to stiffen the legs to maintain their shape. She said she’d make some time to help me create these pants.

That time never materialized. So more time passed. And square pants remained just an idea.

Until one day a year later I met a fellow student who liked to make her own clothes. She was willing to spend some time with me over our Christmas break to make some square pants.

Finally we made something. A prototype.

We ended up using straws in the leg bottoms to get them to keep a square shape. But as I walked the square straw bottoms would bang into each other and the legs would twist. I’d have corkscrew legs.

The straws weren’t going to work. I took them out. And in the end this is what I ended up with.

Yes, they look pretty ridiculous.

They turned out quite different then what I thought they’d look like. But they did turn out to look awesome at a rave or Halloween. Just not for real life.

But I’m pretty proud of these damn pants.

They taught me all sorts of lessons. Some I acknowledged at the time, and some I only realize now as I think back about them.

They taught me things like how hard it is to depend solely on others to turn your ideas into a reality. How terrible a place it is to be where you have an idea, but don’t have any of the resources to fabricate that idea. You can imagine that’s helped me make sure I learn the things I need to learn in order to get things accomplished. I take classes. I read books. I learn a great deal about many things I’m not very good at to start with. Not because I want to exclude other people from helping me. But because if I can’t find or afford someone to help, I really, really don’t want to be stuck.

Those square pants taught me an idea isn’t worth much unless it’s executed on. And even then, the first execution is probably going to be terrible. But that first prototype does amazing things. You see the problems your idea is going to have in real life. You start to realize if this is even a project you’d enjoy doing long term. “Long term” being the likely amount of time to actually make something worthy out of an idea.

Most importantly those square pants taught me that the first prototype is actually often a lot easier to accomplish than I first imagined. When you’re talking about an idea, a lot of us feel that it’s going to take insane amounts of effort to even get started. The truth is that a first prototype often isn’t as much work as you’d think. It turns out that actually turning an idea into a business is more work than you’d imagine, but getting started and getting some initial momentum is a place most people seem to get stuck, but really shouldn’t be.

So when people ask me for advice about getting started with their idea, it often simply comes down to this.

Stop talking to me about your idea.

Start putting little pieces together to get something, anything, accomplished.

It’s probably going to look ridiculous. You might even be sick of the idea by the end of it. What you will have though is a body of work you can continue to learn from and give you momentum to keep going or launch a new project. But you won’t have any regrets.

Go out and make your own square pants.

P.S. I’d be incredibly thrilled to meet you on Twitter: here