Endure the Risk of a Bad Idea
I once asked David Kelley what he would say to someone who’s intimidated by the volume of material required to get to a good idea. (Depending on one’s field, research suggests anywhere from ~200 on the low end to ~10,000 on the high end. Just taking this recent article from Google X as an example, if you assume that ~4% of ideas they investigate succeed, that means you need to start by investigating 25 ideas! That’s not to mention the funnel that ultimately leads to the ~100 they decide to investigate each year!!)
Back to David’s response to my question: “I think people fail to realize that the first-order goal is to be getting in practice. The first step is training your mind to think differently.”
I liken it to the high school athlete who turns every jug of milk into a dumbbell: when your goal is to build muscle, all of a sudden, the world yields surprising opportunities!
I was talking to a fantastically successful founder the other day and she told me that sometimes she’ll just go on walks, holding something in her hand, and pushing herself to combine it with things she sees. While we were talking, she picked up a ruler and a pencil: “For example, what happens if you combine these? A pencil you could use to measure stuff? All you’d need to add is hash marks, and that could actually be pretty useful!”
(I just tried the same thing a minute ago, as I was formulating this post in my head: I had just finished trimming my hair with clippers and was standing at the sink. I said to myself, “What do these have in common? How can I combine them?” And immediately I thought of a hair clipper that would wash the little itchy specs of hair away the moment it cut them! Actually pretty cool!)
I think for most people, the challenge isn’t actually coming up with ideas; it’s enduring the perceived risk of coming up with a bad idea. When someone interacts with a prompt to generate ideas, inevitably, even before ideas come, the fear creeps in: “But what if it’s a bad idea? What if it seems pointless?” This is where the training mindset that David mentioned is so important: the goal is the new combination itself — good or bad! — not the quality of the new combination. So if I made a new combination, I have necessarily succeeded according to a training mindset. I’ve just done one “rep” with the proverbial gallon of milk.
It’s so important to remember that the cost of writing down a bad idea is basically zero! And yet how hard it is to get ourselves to write down anything other than “a good idea” (I loved the idea of the “bad brainstorm” from the Google article above.) But we’ll never build the muscle without flexing a bit, and enduring a few painfully bad ideas.
That’s why the entire first chapter of the Klutz guide to juggling (Juggling for the Complete Klutz) consists of tossing the ball up and NOT catching it — NOT “juggling” technically — because the first step to learning to juggle is to desensitize oneself to the thud of dropping the ball. It costs nothing! Nothing breaks! On to the next attempt.
And it’s the same way with the idea muscle: nothing breaks when you write down a bad idea; far from it, you’re training your brain to ignore the self-censor that insists upon only “good ideas.” You’re allowing yourself freedom to play. This is where a daily idea quota can be fantastically helpful as a practice. An executive from Singapore recently told me, “I’m so glad you suggested coming up with 10 ideas per day. I’ve noticed all my best ideas usually come after 6 or 7 bad ones… usually after I write down something illegal!”
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