Good is the enemy of great
Look around you. Look at all the good ideas. All the good stuff. Products. Services. Art. Entertainment. Try to find great stuff.
Voltaire said, “Good is the enemy of great.”
When it comes to creative thinking in business, I believe the reason most people don’t come up with great ideas is because they come up with a good idea, and then they stop.
In all fields, we see too many people, even pretty creative people, stop at their first good idea too often. Is it because they are too busy? Too lazy? Their standard is too low?
Take advertising, the business where I made a living for 20 years as a player and the past dozen or so as a coach; by today’s standards, most work that was done 20, 30 years ago was pretty bad. Back when the average American was exposed to fewer than 1200 messages a day, the best advertising stood out, as much as anything, because most of the work was not very good.
Today, the average work that appears in the media is much better. I’ll even say it’s good. But what good is good? When the average American is exposed to over 3,000 messages, how many are making an impact? Even if you say 10% (which I think is a high estimate at 300), still 90% of the work is invisible or forgettable.
“But it’s pretty good!” you might protest. And I say, “it doesn’t matter. If it isn’t great, it’s not worth much in the ad sweepstakes.”
Good is seductive. Good is too often good enough to feel like you’re finished thinking, but not good enough to win big in the marketplace.
When it comes to looking for fresh ideas, one of the reasons I believe people settle for good is because they may actually be trying too hard to be really good, great even. And in trying so hard, they are editing too much.
When brainstorming, for instance, people very frequently hold back considering a particular idea because their internal judge deems it less than great, bad even. That judgment, no matter how well intended, is hurting their creative process.
I say, let ideas flow, period. Good, bad, ugly,… let them all flow. This leads to volume. This silences the judge. This leads to a lot of pretty crappy ideas, sure, but I believe crappy ideas, or shall we say, fertilizer, helps the creative process.
I see it all the time as a creative coach; in group-think and elsewhere, where a “bad” idea opens up the thinking to a better idea, even a great idea. And since thinking of fresh ideas is like a thought chain; where this idea is linked to the next, and then to the next, etc., if we skip any one link in the chain, “good bye!” there goes the pathway to a better idea.
Forget the judgment of good or bad. By not editing your thought process you are creating a momentum of thinking that simply leads to more ideas. And since the law of large numbers (see previous post on the topic) gives you better odds of finding a great idea, why would you ever want to settle for good and stop this freight train of creative energy?
Good breeds good. Great breeds great. It is so obvious when you look at the creative output of a company. Are the companies that consistently produce great ideas simply that much better, or are they simply not stopping at good?
Good is seductive. But good is the enemy. Because good, in the end, isn’t particularly good.
