Execution is everything

I think my football coach friends can related to this concept very well:

Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up.

It may seem counterintuitive, but I would claim this really applies to scientific research as well, despite that Holy Grail/Eureka mentality of science (e.g., string theory, cancer cures...). It's not that people haven't come up with a number of novel approaches to solving a problem much like your own. It's that they either gave up on them or started working on them to run into a problem that technology has since changed or solved.