Quick: come up with an innovative idea!

If you’re anything like the thousands of students I’ve coached in the last fifteen years, panic alarms just went off.

But the truth is, the creative process is hardly a mystery – in fact, it can be broken down into three simple steps.

From Steve Jobs to Taylor Swift to Seth Godin, there’s remarkable consistency among “the greats”: having bad ideas is a necessary precondition to having good ones.

Taylor Swift and Isaac Asimov feel the same way about doing creative work: It can be embarrassing! How an innovator navigates those waters can make all the difference. Ben Franklin’s tactics provide clues…

Taylor Swift illuminates one of the most counterintuitive findings in all the creativity literature: the best way to have a good idea is to allow yourself to have lots of bad ideas. Seth Godin agrees.