Mediocre ideas can lead to good ones

Great ideas often seem obvious in retrospect. But sadly, breakthroughs tend not to appear like a shaft of light coming down from the sky (much as we like those stories — see Monday’s post!).

Since true eureka moments are few and far between, sometimes the best way to come up with a great idea is to generate lots of merely OK ones. This is because the process of generating the OK ones gets your brain working. You start to make connections and come up with ideas — some of which can be built upon.

This is, of course, the theory behind brainstorming — that frequent corporate exercise where people are supposed to shout out any ideas they have. Lots of people have pointed out the problems with this. Ideas shared by powerful people tend to be given more weight, and are more likely to be built upon, than those by less-powerful people. Quiet people tend not to like to shout out ideas, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have ideas. Often, groups get better ideas by having people pre-submit their proposals, then circulating them and letting people build on them.

But that more thoughtful strategy does still get at the idea that mediocre ideas can lead to good ones. Rather than dismissing ideas out of hand, you see what new ideas come from the OK ideas and then start evaluating those.

For instance, maybe you and your college friends can’t decide where to go for a long weekend together. Rather than argue, you decide to list all the places you can think of, and to be funny, you throw out 36 hours in Auckland, even though you’re all in the mid-Atlantic region of the US. Someone mentions camping in the Everglades in August. But after that, someone riffing on this ridiculous theme mentions Lake Como, and then you remember that you once had a blast at a cabin near much more accessible Lake George. A consensus starts to build around that destination. Bad ideas lead to a good one.

I know I’ve had this experience with generating podcast ideas and book ideas. Book ideas in particular are challenging because the idea needs to be good enough to sustain 60,000-70,000 words and my interest for two years of my life. But rather than waiting for the perfect idea, I come up with dozens of OK ideas, and write articles about them, and write podcast scripts about them, and see what people say. If I get a lot of feedback about one, and I keep thinking about it, that might mean it’s worth pursuing, or at least that a different angle might be workable. Believe it or not, my book 168 Hours came out of a series of articles I wrote about focusing on your core competencies as a parent.

So if you’re stuck on a difficult problem, generate as many possible solutions as you can. Don’t worry that many of your ideas are not brilliant. Of course they aren’t. Most ideas aren’t! As you keep thinking about the situation, and coming back to it, and thinking about the ideas you’ve come up with, you’ll come up with more and more ideas, and just through the sheer law of averages some will have to be better than others. You’ll get these ideas because you’re being open minded and creative about what could work — rather than getting stuck on why various things won’t. Mediocre ideas can lead to good ideas. It happens all the time.

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