Page 103 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

94 100 MPH THINKING: THINKING AT THE SPEED OF ENLIGHTENMENT

If you’re going to tell me, “Yeah, but that means the majority are
lousy,” then I’m sorry, pal, but you’re seeing the idea font half empty.
Who cares how many are bad! Some are pretty damn good, maybe
even great. That’s all you should care about.

The best baseball players, guys with batting averages of .300,
still fail 7 out of 10 times.

The best scientists fail more than the average scientists. The best
films have miles of outtakes on the editing room floor. Get over this
desire for perfection. It can’t be achieved.

7

FERTILIZER

I often hear people who think they understand creativity say things
like, “There’s no such thing as a bad idea.”
Are they kidding?
There are bad ideas all around us. There are horrible ideas that
stay ideas, never making it out of the concept realm to be executed,
thank heaven. Lousy ideas also come to fruition that at best never have
a chance at succeeding and at worst put companies out of business.
I have no problem with bad ideas in the conceptual stage. In fact, I
think they’re a healthy part of the creative process.
Let me tell you why.
I often hear people refer to bad ideas as crap, and that’s the polite
word. Actually, I think that description is pretty close, but I like to use
a more constructive term: fertilizer.
Fertilizer helps things grow.
When people generate tons of ideas using 100 MPH Thinking,
believe me, they are not all great ideas. In fact, most of the time a very
small percentage are decent ideas, and an even smaller proportion are
actually good ideas. But the other ideas act as fertilizer.
When I’m facilitating a group brainstorming session (see page
206), I can often look across a large room at many teams ideating, and
from a distance I can tell you which groups have the best ideas. It’s the
groups with the most ideas. Oh, sure, they also have the most bad
ideas, but that means they have more fertilizer.
Often, when running a workshop or brainstorming session, I offer
a prize to the team that generates the most ideas. Offering a prize as an
incentive often gets the competitive juices flowing. “The prize,” I tell