I have a lot of bad ideas. Literally thousands of them. Not
just bad, but terrible ideas. And, they are the secret to my success in this
job.
As researchers, ideas are what fuel our progress. This fact
is both exhilarating and intimidating, and where you lie on that spectrum of
emotions is probably closely tied to how reliable of a process you have for
generating and developing your ideas. Last month, we confronted the fallacy
that generating ideas is a “magical” process of waiting for inspiration to
strike, and we explored systematic ways to produce ideas. But, if you do
research, you know that having ideas isn’t enough – you need to have good ideas. This month, we’ll confront a second fallacy –
that this process involves brilliant people generating brilliant ideas on the
first try.
Adam Grant is a Professor of Management at the Wharton
School, where his research includes studying the hallmarks of creativity. One conclusion that he draws from his work is that “The more
output you churn out, the more variety you get, and the better your chances of
stumbling on something truly original.” In other words – if you want to have
good ideas, you need to have a lot of ideas. And, chances are that if you have
a lot of ideas, you are going to have a lot of bad ideas.
How then, do we separate the few good ideas from the
overwhelming excess of bad ideas? Next month, I’ll dive into the specifics of
this process, but before we get there we need to start with the obvious first
step – you need to be willing look closely, even though most of what you see is
going to be ugly.
While crucial, this step is surprisingly difficult. Why is that?
The easy answer is that you might feel like you’re wasting your time
looking at bad ideas. I want to challenge you to consider some other reasons
you might find this task difficult (I can list these because I struggle with
every one of them):
- If my idea is bad, I’ll feel unintelligent
- If other people see my bad idea, they will think that I’m unintelligent
- If this idea is bad, it might mean I’m just bad at coming up with ideas and I will never have good ideas
- The stakes are high – I am relying on my ideas to secure a fellowship or grant, a job, or tenure
Now that we’ve got all that out in the open, how do we move
forward? A big part of the answer lies in how you view your abilities and
intelligence. Carol Dweck, a renowned
Professor of Psychology at Stanford, hypothesizes that there are two ways that
we can view our intelligence and abilities:
Fixed mindset: Intelligence
and talent are fixed traits that are set at birth. These factors alone determine the level of
success you can achieve.
Growth mindset: Intelligence
and talent are just the starting point and can be improved thorough hard work. Effort
and persistence result in growth, which leads to success.
A detailed unpacking what this means for us as researchers
and people is a topic for another blog post, but hopefully you can see the
difference that this makes in how you approach your bad ideas. From the fixed mindset, having bad ideas not
only judges your current abilities, but also defines your future potential for
success (or lack thereof). That’s terrifying! In contrast, the growth mindset
allows you to take an honest look at both the good and bad, as you know that
there is a path forward to improvement, no matter what your starting point or
the bad ideas you have along the way.
Another way to think about this is to view doubt as an
essential step in the creative process. Adam Grant highlights, “…there
are two different kinds of doubt. There's self-doubt and idea-doubt. Self-doubt
is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea-doubt is energizing. It
motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine…” The fixed mindset traps you
at self-doubt, whereas the growth mindset allows you to skip over this step and
focus on idea-doubt.
Next month, I’ll discuss the process that we use to evaluate
and refine our ideas, with the goal of quickly discarding the bad ideas and focusing
our energy on making the good ideas better. In the meantime, spend some time
observing how you think about your ideas – when a new idea pops into your head,
do you race to look closely and investigate the potential weaknesses, or do you
hide it away to think about later? Challenge yourself to push toward a growth
mindset and see if this makes a difference.
The faster you can move through the bad ideas, the more quickly you will
find the good ones!
Have thoughts or experiences you want to share? Think my
approach to this topic is itself a bad idea? Leave a comment and let’s discuss!
