Go for Volume First
You do not find good ideas by waiting for the perfect one. You find them by generating many — most of them bad — because quantity is the reliable path to quality.
Idea flow is the engine of creativity: the sheer number of ideas you can produce on a problem. Research and practice agree that the best idea in a large batch almost always beats the first idea you would have stopped at.
It works because early ideas are the obvious ones — the clichés your brain reaches for first. Only after you exhaust them do you push into the strange, the specific, and the genuinely new. Volume drags you past the obvious.
So the goal in the first pass is count, not quality. Twenty rough ideas, not one polished one. You are not trying to be right yet; you are filling a pool wide enough that a few gems are statistically likely to be in it.
Chase the count, not the winner
Set a number and beat it
Before judging anything, commit to a quota: twenty ideas, forty, a hundred. The quota forces you past your first few safe answers into the interesting ones.
- Generate twenty before you keep one
- The tenth idea usually beats the first
Write down the bad ones too
Bad ideas are stepping stones and permission to keep going. Record everything; a weak idea often points straight at a strong neighbour.
Only then, select
Once the pool is full, switch modes and pick. Choosing from forty options is a different, later job than producing them.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas — then throw most of them away.