Going with your first idea is rarely a good idea.*
One of the biggest mistakes most people make in creative pursuits is to go with the first good idea they come up with, or worse yet, they go with the first idea, period.
Years ago when I was an advertising creative director and used to look at dozens of portfolios a month, I could tell four pages into a book if that person was shooting from the hip or really thinking through a marketing problem and finding fresh solutions. When you do something for a living, you can spot this type of lazy thinking a mile away — ideas that are tired clichés, not surprising, differentiating concepts
Today as a creative thinking coach serving many industries, I continue to see this rush to creativeness. There have always been two subsets of the population who tend to fall into this trap. But, more and more, I find this inclination across the board.
The easiest group to peg with this tendency to stop at the first good idea are juniors. In spite of often being eager to create, this group simply hasn’t been around enough to know the obvious, been-done solutions from the truly breakthrough ideas. To this group I say use your boundless energy to look at lots of concepts in raw form, then bring a short list (maybe six or eight solutions) to your supervisor for final judgment. Of course, for your short list to be six or eight solutions your long list needs to be dozens of possibilities. For an expansion of sheer quantity’s role in the creative process check out my post on the “law of large numbers” to see how high achievers tend to be prolific thinkers.
Another group that too frequently falls into the go-with-the-first-idea” pattern are very senior people. They’ve seen a lot of problems in their careers and have a stockpile of pat solutions, so when a new problem looks familiar, they simply plug in a “tried and true” idea. “Heck, it worked before, can’t it work again?” they say, “Besides, I’m busy.”
And therein lies the element that is too frequently turning the masses these days into lazy creative thinkers: the busy factor. People in business are simply so pressed, so jammed, they are willing to sacrifice quality thinking to get the work out. A short-term mentality if I ever saw one. The real winners in business know that you can’t always solve new problems with old ideas. I mean if the old solution existed when the problem arose then that, by definition, means the old solution is not going to do the job. Busy people rationalize this, they go with their first good idea and it too often comes back to haunt them.
People visiting this site probably don’t need an explanation of why we need fresh ideas in business. But I will state that the success of thriving companies, brands and products most frequently comes from clear differentiation, and isn’t that alone an outcome of fresh thinking?
As for advice on how to go beyond your first good idea, I could say just do it. But you knew that didn’t you? And that still hasn’t always been enough motivation to follow through when time is short and the pressure is on. One thing I will say is that a common denominator to most of the thinking methods used in Before & After’s creativity workshops involve generating lots of ideas in rough form in a short amount of time. Our 100MPH Thinking™ tool uses the law of large numbers to propel a thinker beyond the obvious. Our Intergalactic Thinking™ and Ask a Better Question tools immediately put people in a place where fresh ideas are more likely to arise. (Read lots more about these methods at their respective links.) And, again, since all of these processes are shortcuts to fresh ideas, then we can’t use the “being too busy” excuse, as these methods are actually time savers and therefore workload diminishers.
Are these methods the only ways to avoid stopping at your first idea? I’m sure they’re not. But they are proven practices used by great thinkers since the beginning of time and are cornerstone concepts in a professional development program me and my other creative thinking coaches have used with over a quarter of a million people, so they just might be worth a shot. That is, until you come up with a better idea. And, that, I surely encourage.
* For the record, this image was my first idea for this article. Kinda shows, doesn’t it? Actually I was inspired to write this article after seeing this logo on one of this company’s weather stripping products. Often when I see an idea that’s not well developed I simply chalk it off to another individual or company shooting from the hip creatively. This time, it inspired an article. So I went with it for the article, not because I thought it was a great idea, but because I felt it was a good illustration for my purposes.
