Drive Quality By Quantity

Kevin Kelly, the founder of WIRED, has recently updated his list of “unsolicited pieces of advice.” They are excellent. One that struck a chord with me was, “A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea.”

This is an oft referenced, but seldom practiced, truth. It resonates with Isaac Asimov’s observation that, “For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.”

I’ve written about this before, both about how to deal with the embarrassment inherent in the creative process, and also about the mindset required to endure the risk of a bad idea. Yet even for myself, it’s hard to remember - and I vowed to “join the quantity group” for New Year’s! ** Show me a person who comes up with a volume of possible answers instead of the answer — or better yet, a number of possible questions, rather than the question — and I’ll show you a wildly creative individual.

One technique we’ve been advocating in our classes at Stanford is a “Daily Idea Quota,” a regular practice of deliberately flipping your mindset to a quantity orientation — as opposed to a quality orientation — on one problem per day.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.

**As an aside, down a dark corner of the internet, I found this fantastic piece of investigative journalism (by James Clear, via Austin Kleon) to get to the source of the parable that advocates for the quality group.