If you have been in enough meetings with me, you will see shadows and glimpses of angry John from years ago. I have done the math and have determined that most people are eligible for four to eleven hours of active meeting non-aggression. At that point, I have to go down a flowchart with words like “business customer” or “pays my salary” to determine if I re-up those hours. If you hit zero, I will attack you like a nineteen seventies cigarette ad, which means I will attempt to reshape your daily habits and make you look cooler to everyone around you.
I wish to crumple up and toss at least one of your habits into your mental waste bin. It is not your most obnoxious behavior; it is your use of double negatives. Perhaps thou didst observe what I didst there. There is nothing that chaps my jimmies quite so much as the thoughtful person at the end of the table nodding over their steepled fingers and raising an eyebrow to state, “That is not a bad idea.”
This just in: It could be a good idea.
Let’s set that aside for a moment, along with the gaslighting you get from being told your idea isn’t that bad.
The deep truth is that most ideas are, in fact, bad ideas.
And that is okay.
Having bad ideas does not mean you do not have good ideas. In fact, having bad ideas is a necessary condition for having good ideas. Everyone has some internal ratio of bad ideas to good ideas; generally speaking, the number of bad ideas you have is larger than the number of good ideas.
This is still okay.
It is important to tell you that this is okay and you are okay.
I have just as many bad ideas as the next person, and I have accepted this.
People participating in ideation might already know this deep secret of Idea Making… Perhaps they do not. Your goal is to have as many ideas as possible and have a safe enough place where your ideas can be shared so that you do not suffer ego death when someone takes a raging dump on them. Ideas should live or die by their merit. You will eventually find your ratio of bad ideas to good ideas, and as you succeed with good ideas, your volume of bad ideas needed per good idea will go down.
In early mobile game development, I reached the point where one idea out of five was good. Each good idea at that time generated enough revenue to fund six more games. Based on that math, the odds were reasonably good that I could keep making games and publishing them profitable enough to live to ideate another day.
I have already talked elsewhere about “not a bad idea.” The point I want to make today is that you need to have a thousand bad ideas to generate any number of good ideas.
It is okay to say something is a good idea. It is also okay to say something is a bad idea. The most important thing is to keep having ideas and improving your tools and filters to know which is which.
With that in mind, it is time to talk Amazon-Affiliate-Linked-Recommendations.
Good idea: Delicious 16-Year-Old Lagavulin Scotch Whiskey. It puts out the fire and keeps in the warmth!
Bad idea: A 36-pack of alcohol-free White Claw. My own experience with White Claw is limited to “I was there when it happened, officer,” and that is how I want it to be. I cannot fathom that there is a customer out there for one, let alone thirty-six cans of “The Taste of White Claw.”
You may now take my very best Greta Thunberg stare into the weekend. It will be a great weekend if you hurry up and get an amazing bottle of scotch from above. I have no idea what kind of weekend you will have with that many alcohol-free cans of White Claw, but you have a right to do you.
