Falling in love with our own idea
“OK, hear me out, this is the best idea ever, I’ve been working on it for ages. Let me explain why it’s so great!”
Does this seem familiar? I guess we’ve all done it. There’s one caveat though. Sometimes this idea isn’t so great - it might be really awesome for us, but not for the people that it’s for. And it kind of hurts to hear when what we feel is awesome… just doesn’t click. When we are so attached to the idea that it’s “our own”, if we hear “this idea is crap”… then we might asume that “we are crap”. What if we don’t fall in this trap?
Great creatives do a couple of things that average creatives don’t. And these things are so universal you can easily steal them anytime:
first and most important, they explore what the idea is for and who is it for; they spend a lot of time just falling in love with the problem, going broader and more narrow until they have fuel to come up with different angles for ideas to solve it
they don’t fall in love with their own idea - in fact, they’re ready and even excited sometimes to kill it to come up with better ones; this detachment to the success of the idea and to the fact they made it makes them much more free to explore and come up with different ideas, and take (crappy or great) feedback as a judgement of the work, not of themselves, which takes us to the next point
they come up with multiple ideas and give them as options to the people they’re for - this is a killer tactic also because it resets the frame of mind of the receiver from “i like it” or “i hate it” or to a place that is more open, more nuanced and where people can judge more clearly as they have choices and parts to compare: “i like this part here”, “this one is weird but…”, “this one does this thing better”, “what if we take this and make that stronger”
they show vs tell why the idea is great - any artifact that shows the idea in action is much better than an explanation; it’s really much simpler to “see it to believe it” than to “hear it to believe it”; a sketch, poster, crappy prototype, something you can put in people’s hands will make it much easier to understand if you’re onto something powerful or not - and if it feels like the idea works in multiple formats, shapes and forms, it’s usually a great sign
All of these things might help up steer clear of just falling in love without our idea just because we made it - and they also help us steer clear of “first hand ideas” - which might be the ideas that are most obvious but also less impactful. These tips also place us in a space of possibility, where if something sticks and really clicks with the people it’s made for… We can continue building that.
Which brings us to the most important point: as creatives, the ideas we make are not for us. They serve someone else - they need to serve who and what they are for. We just channel them and keep trying to build them so they resonate and make an impact.