I wish someone had told me twenty years ago that it’s okay for most of my ideas to suck. I had to figure this out on my own. I used to be laboriously attached to every idea I came up with, pursuing every thought and every creative impulse like it was my last, like the well was about to run dry, and I was on a good track to burnout my energy and creative spirit.
Deciding at some point that I had to figure out a better way to handle the creative process, I began to force myself to willfully abandon any idea that wasn’t moving forward “in action” or getting traction in my real life. This meant abandoning writing projects, documentary ideas, business ideas – and over time I’ve found that something worthwhile from everything I’ve abandoned has made its way into something else.
Most of your ideas will suck. bad.bad.bad. Like, dirty diapers on a hot summer day bad. The faster you can accept and embrace this, the more open you’ll be to laughing off bad ideas and making room for fucking awesome ideas. And you know what? Some element of nearly every bad.bad.bad idea I’ve ever had has popped up in something better.
Rather than making me feel like a creative failure, letting the bad ideas go and re-surface as something else has opened a whole new vista of creative freedom for me.
If you’re looking at every idea as an expression of yourself and over-investing every idea with importance far beyond what a mere electrochemical semi-spiritual brain output deserves (and that’s really all ideas are – electro-chemical brain farts), you’re fucked. Drop the shit that isn’t working, pronto, and create space. Think of it like cleaning out a refrigerator of rotting food so you can shop for fresh stuff.
Tell your bad ideas “you suck, get the fuck out of here” and laugh at that stupid piece of shit as you kick his ass out the door.