The fertilizer in which good ideas grow

September 30, 2015 2:32 PM

Job number one isn’t to have good ideas, it’s to have gobs of ideas. To strengthen the creative muscle until it’s quivering and veiny and oiled up. Because any seed to imagination is healthy, safe and useful.

In fact, bad ideas might someday inspire you to come up with something better. They’re the fertilizer in which your good ideas grow.

My wife and I come up with bad ideas on a daily basis. Every night at dinner, we add to our running list of insane product concepts, bizarre television shows and absurd web applications. It’s great fun, great practice and great training for our creative brains.

What’s more, you never know when you might need an old idea, It could rise again one day to enhance a perspective the present cannot imagine.

The other point is, bad ideas aren’t always bad because of poor quality, but because of poor timing.

Magnavox created the first video game console, but the designers failed to include a central processing unit and memory chip in each cartridge. Woops.

Xerox’s launched the first personal computer in the early eighties, but it was slower than syrup and cost sixteen thousand dollars. Yikes.

Gateway attempted to combined television and personal computing in one device, but customers weren’t convinced that they needed such a product. Bummer.

And so, each of these ideas were inherently good, but bad because the marketplace and the technology and the culture weren’t ready for them yet.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How can you expect to have a good idea if you haven’t had a hundred bad ones first?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “19 Way to be the One Person Everybody Remembers at the Conference,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com