Successful ideas come from your amount or total ideas.
And listen carefully:
When you hear dozens of successful people, across multiple disciplines, say the same thing – you start to notice.
This has been something I have run into at the intersection of persistence, practice, and patience.
And now here it is again on the nature of creating new ideas.
For Picasso had much more output than we suppose, and this story about a ceramics class illustrates the same.
Writing one good poem has more to do with writing 100 bad poems than it does diligently salving away on one piece.
So if you want to write 300 good poems – you had better get to work.
Exactly like I just said: One bad idea is one step closer to success.
If originals aren’t reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.”
-Adam Grant, Originals