Why you should embrace your awful, terrible, no good ideas!

Read time: 3-4 minutes

Great ideas require creativity

We all know this. We accept this statement as true. But if you’re anything like me, you all too often sabotage yourself and allow this statement to be the barrier between you and success. How? By telling yourself that you aren’t part of that elite group of creative people that come up with great ideas. We sell ourselves short and believe that any successful solutions we’ve employed in the past (and yes, every single one of us has had them) were anomalies at best, strokes of dumb luck at worst.

We make the mistake of convincing ourselves that, try as we might, we are just not creative enough to come up with great ideas. Bad ideas, those we can come up with; great ideas, many of us feel like those continually elude us.

Unfortunately, since we don’t want to think of ourselves as failures who only come up with bad ideas, we stop coming up with any ideas at all. We allow others to live the dream while we sit on the sidelines wishing we were the geniuses who were doing what they do. At the same time, we belittle ourselves by thinking that we couldn’t possibly be part of their elite group. You know, that elite group of geniuses whose ideas are always great.

Geniuses have awful, terrible, no-good ideas

News flash, the geniuses don’t only have great ideas. They have bad ones. Awful, terrible, no-good ideas that we would be embarrassed to associate with our name. And here’s the best part, they have these bad ideas more often than those great ideas!

Thomas Edison literally changed the world forever with his work regarding the light bulb. The light bulb as we know it was one of those great ideas that each of us is dying to have, but it wasn’t the first idea he had. In fact, there were hundreds (thousands by some accounts) of awful, terrible, no-good ideas before finding the one that was great. We may envy him for the final product, but no one was envying him when he was failing to make light bulbs out of wood or paper.

All ideas require creativity

Yes, even the awful, terrible, no-good ones. It takes a creative mind to come up with a few hundred (or thousand) ways to NOT make a light bulb. Are paper light bulbs a great idea? Not really. But are they creative? Absolutely!

Give yourself permission to be awful, terrible, and no-good

In fact, if you’re having difficulty coming up with that great idea, maybe you need to redirect your focus. Don’t focus on great if that’s causing you to stop altogether. Focus instead on being creative. Allow yourself to be creative without punishing yourself for the idea not being great.

Want some examples? Certainly you can do just as awful as some of these:

• A car with hotdogs for wheels, you know, instead of rubber tires
• Using string to attach small birds to your hair
• Spray painting your boss’s car to match her fingernail polish
• Brushing your teeth with chocolate syrup
• Leaving your wallet in your pocket while swimming (I’ve tested this one; it’s not a great idea)
• Putting lotion on your hands immediately before getting on the monkey bars (Unfortunately, I did this as a kid and trust me, it was definitely an AWFUL idea!)

Awful. Terrible. No good. (And sometimes painful!)

But creative.

Your assignment

Intentionally make a list of ideas that you think are awful.

And don’t stop at six. Or twenty. Just start writing.

No one has to see your list if you don’t want them to. No one’s going to make you post it or share it. Just sit down (you probably already are, so you’re halfway there) and start writing out bad ideas. The worse, the better. You can’t get really dreadful ideas without letting the creative juices flow.

Your elite group membership may be just around the corner

Be careful. While you’re being creative and coming up with those retched ideas, you just might have a few great ideas sneak in. Who knows, before long you might be one of those people with a great idea.

You’ll also be one of those people with a long list of awful, terrible, no-good ideas. At that point, you’ll certainly belong in that group of elite geniuses. Congratulations!

I know I said no one is going to make you post or share your list. However, if you are willing, I’d love to see some of your really awful ideas in the comments. (Not the good ones, we’ll save them for another post…just the awful, terrible, no-good ones today.)