Standing on a compost pile of bad ideas

Creativity is not about having one big idea, it’s about sustaining a steady stream of ideas.

Nothing against one hit wonders, as those are some of my favorite songs, and most musicians would rather have a single song that everyone knows, rather than labor in obscurity forever.

But for the majority of us, one idea does not a career make. Prolific creators need to have an entire mountain of gold to mine, not just one nugget to milk for a lifetime.

Remember the pet rock from the seventies? That absurd toy was marketed like a live pet, in its custom cardboard box, complete with straw and breathing holes.

Interesting story, the inventor of that fad was also an award winning copywriter, creative director and advertising agency owner. It’s not like he just came up with this idea one day on a whim. Dahl, over the course of his career, probably had tens of thousands of ideas. Many of which were bad or average at best.

But he kept producing, every single day, because he knew that the best way to see a good idea was to stand on a compost pile of bad ones.

Prolificacy then, is the intentional goal; and innovation is incidental result.

In my own experience as the guy who made a career from wearing nametag, that’s only because I left behind me a wake of failed attempts at dozens of other quirky identity experiments.

Ask anyone who knew me as a kid, or in my first few years of college pre nametag. I was always trying to find my thing. Perpetually trying some quirky trademark that made me memorable and expressed my identity. It was only a matter of time before something stuck. Quite literally.

Invention, then, could be expressed as a formula of volume plus time. Building a product that sticks out by being a person who sticks around.

Stephen King comes to mind, maybe the most successful fiction author in modern literature. He wrote stories and novels that sold millions of copies, some of which were adapted into movies that became instant classics. According a recent interview with the author:

No one in their mind could argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes him as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.

There’s a man who didn’t have one big idea, but a steady stream of them. King has spent his career toning his hot body of work, and the results have been amazing.

Are you willing to sift through piles of bad ideas, just to find the one that sticks?

Good. Just know that it might take longer than you think. And be ready to keep returning to that mine every day, hammering away into stubborn earth, until some gold shows its shy face.

Remember, creativity is a long term relationship. Sometimes you have to, as Stephen King’s most famous character did in The Shawshank Redemption, crawl through a river shit to come out clean on the other side.

How many ideas did you come up with today?