[This is the first of a several part series on my relationship and my approach to ideas.]
Part 1: What is your relationship to your ideas?
A fun exercise: you have 10 arrows, 1 target, you're 100 m away and there is an Olympian archer standing next to you. Your goal is to get as many arrows as close to the bulls-eye as possible. You have 5 minutes.
What will you do? How much time will you spend with the archer perfecting your approach, your angle, your release, etc? Remember you only have 10 arrows and 5 minutes.
Let’s replace arrows with ideas. Is it better to cycle through many ideas quickly in the hopes that many will cluster around the bulls-eye? Or is it better to take as much time as allowable and nail one solid idea down? My default approach to idea generation depends on my relationship with my idea, whether I’m in-like or in-love.
I find that if I’m in-love with an idea I’m much less attuned to objectively accepting any critique. If, however, I’m merely in-like with the idea, I find that a) I’m much more apt to accept all sorts of feedback (be it positive or negative), revisions, etc; and b) I’m much better positioned to create corollary or flanker ideas from the original. I postulate that if I’m in-love with my idea, I may be over-committed (after all, isn’t love blind?) and not able to listen to differences of opinion, whereas in-like, not so much. The downside to my approach is to be mindful of idea-indifference, where I simply don’t care one way or the other. If that’s the case, I toss that idea aside altogether.
Part 2: Time Constraints
Part 1: What is your relationship to your ideas?
A fun exercise: you have 10 arrows, 1 target, you're 100 m away and there is an Olympian archer standing next to you. Your goal is to get as many arrows as close to the bulls-eye as possible. You have 5 minutes.
What will you do? How much time will you spend with the archer perfecting your approach, your angle, your release, etc? Remember you only have 10 arrows and 5 minutes.
Let’s replace arrows with ideas. Is it better to cycle through many ideas quickly in the hopes that many will cluster around the bulls-eye? Or is it better to take as much time as allowable and nail one solid idea down? My default approach to idea generation depends on my relationship with my idea, whether I’m in-like or in-love.
I find that if I’m in-love with an idea I’m much less attuned to objectively accepting any critique. If, however, I’m merely in-like with the idea, I find that a) I’m much more apt to accept all sorts of feedback (be it positive or negative), revisions, etc; and b) I’m much better positioned to create corollary or flanker ideas from the original. I postulate that if I’m in-love with my idea, I may be over-committed (after all, isn’t love blind?) and not able to listen to differences of opinion, whereas in-like, not so much. The downside to my approach is to be mindful of idea-indifference, where I simply don’t care one way or the other. If that’s the case, I toss that idea aside altogether.
Part 2: Time Constraints
