How to throw away a bad idea

This week, I threw away 5 months of work on a project after realizing I was going in the wrong direction. It feels liberating to cut my losses and move on to something fresh. I only wish I had done this after 5 weeks, not 5 months! I think one reason it took me so long is that I was secretly waiting for someone to tell me to quit. Isn’t failure so much more tractable when a boss, professor, or mentor authorizes it? But when a project is yours, the murky decision of how, when, and why to fail is often yours to make, and it’s not an easy one. It turns out the people best at this have a name for it.

Studies of Nobel laureates show that they are exceptional at “flexible focus.” They can go deep and drill into a promising idea with almost obsessive concentration. But once they realize the idea’s flawed, they can flexibly pivot to something entirely different. When writing a book, Danny Kahneman could crumple up an entire chapter, toss it in the wastebasket, and start over from scratch. Linus Pauling, a polarizing figure who won two Nobel Prizes, also said:

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

Yet Pauling himself famously had trouble throwing away a bad idea of his own—that vitamin C could treat cancer—despite the mounting evidence against it. The genius who told us to discard bad ideas spent years unable to discard his own!

Why is it so hard to move on from “bad” ideas?

First, it’s hard to ignore sunk costs. After months spent on a promising idea, throwing it away feels like abandoning something valuable, so you keep going to justify what you've already invested. The trick is to remind yourself that even when you throw away an idea, you keep the skills, relationships, and experiences you earned working on it. You lose the idea itself, but not the capacity to find better ideas.

But even if you convince yourself to throw away a bad idea, there’s another obstacle that’s often harder to overcome: social pressure. Your fans might still believe in the idea, so you feel obligated to keep going to appease them. Or, your critics might feel vindicated if they hear that you’re “quitting”, so you feel pressure to keep going to deny them the satisfaction. Either way, other people’s expectations become a cage, and flexible focus is impossible when you're boxed in.

I think this is one reason why creative people are so famously indifferent to what others think. When they feel boxed in by social pressure, they aren’t afraid to break away and work on something different—even if it hurts some feelings or invites gossip. Not all of us have this audacity (I’m not sure I do!). Another option is to intentionally surround yourself with supportive people who recognize that flops are part of the craft and that good ideas cannot be manufactured on command. These supporters, who are often fellow creators, understand that creating new ideas requires a lot of frustrating iteration and unproductive stumbling around in the dark. They understand this is an uncomfortable and exhilarating process that is worth the struggle, because it only takes one good idea to make a big difference—and eventually everyone will forget all the bad ideas that preceded it.

I try to remind myself of these lessons as I throw away this idea and get excited for the next one.

Further Reading:

1. How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens

2. The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, Edward Burger and Michael Starbird