Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesThe blank screen has been promoted far beyond its competence. Staring at it harder will not make inspiration feel valued.
Good ideas usually arrive after the obvious ones have been allowed to embarrass themselves. Write twenty headlines and the first five will sound like the category website; by fifteen, language starts taking risks. Sketch eight onboarding routes and the precious first answer loses diplomatic immunity. Let a salesperson test several openings and instinct finally has some evidence to work with. Volume matters because predictable thinking has to leave the building somehow.
But “ideas are cheap” is another lazy slogan. Generating fifty scraps is easy; noticing the strange useful one, developing it and killing the charming failures requires judgement. Keep creation and evaluation apart. Give the first phase permission to be daft, quick and undefended. Then become ruthless: audience, objective, evidence, consequence. Share fragments before they harden, because another mind may connect the two bits yours kept in separate drawers. A wall covered in sticky notes for the LinkedIn photograph is useless without a larger field from which to choose. Creativity suffers when the first thought must also be defensible, budgeted and beloved. Make plenty. Keep very little. Anyone can have more ideas; taste is what prevents them all escaping.