Exhaust the obvious

Your first ten ideas are junk. So are the next twenty.

Designer James Victore proves this to his students with a brutal assignment: 100 sketches of one idea. One sitting. No breaks, no editing, no mercy.

Around sketch 10, students burn through everything obvious. By 30, they're annoyed. By 50, desperate. And somewhere past 70, something strange happens: with the logical answers exhausted, the brain starts reaching into the weird stuff. The illogical. The original.

That's the whole point. The genius was hiding behind the clichés the entire time.

Exhaust the obvious

Everyone's first answers are the same answers. You, me, your competitors: we all reach for the same top drawer. Volume is how you empty it.

Thomas Edison ran his lab on quotas: one minor invention every 10 days, one major breakthrough every six months. He filed 1,093 patents. The lightbulb was buried somewhere in the pile, behind thousands of duds.

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." — Linus Pauling

So next time you need one great idea, hunt for fifty. The first thirty are the toll you pay to reach the interesting ones.

Quantity is the road. Quality is the destination.

— Dan

P.S. Try it this week: 25 versions of one headline, one sitting.