Rules of creativity /02

RULE 02: WORK WORK WORK.

Thanks to Seth Godin, when anyone says “I don’t have any good ideas,” I reply, “Do you have any bad ideas?”

Quantity leads to quality. It is as simple as that.

In school, we were assigned 100 thumbnail sketches for a logo design. None were the final design, anything decent still went through multiple rounds of iterations.

For watch design, after many initial sketches, we did pages and pages of mock-ups - trying various sizes, dial layouts, and CMF (color/material/finish) exploration - before prototyping. And then refining again (and again, sometimes) after prototyping.

Nothing is perfect right out of the gate. Everything goes through a process, an evolution. Bad ideas sink and good ones float. Or sometimes bad ideas evolve into good ones. They all go through iterations. They all evolve or die - but none are useless.

In 2020, during the lockdown, I started doodling and sketching daily. There I have so many sketchbooks full of random seemingly meaningless doodles. Some are garbage - but still exercised my creative muscle. Some bad ones prodded other thoughts and connections which eventually led to decent fully thought-out pieces of art. The decent ones led to pieces that I’m proud of and sell online.

So don’t be afraid to start. Even if you don’t think you have any good ideas, just start generating ideas and testing the decent ones. You’ll find some are better than you thought or they’ll lead you to something greater than expected. If you want good ideas, you’ll have to deal with a lot of bad ideas, too.