In her autobiography Walk through Walls, the performance artist Marina Abramović describes how she teaches her students the process of ideation:
For the first three months, I place each student at a table with a thousand pieces of white paper and a trash can underneath. Every day they have to sit at the table for several hours and write ideas. They put the ideas they like on the right side of the table; the ones they don’t like, they put in the trash. But we don’t throw out the trash.
After three months, I only take the ideas from the trash can. I don’t even look at the ideas they liked. Because the trash can is a treasure trove of things they’re afraid to do.
Perhaps not even looking at the surviving ideas is a bit extreme. It is possible to mull over an idea, and as we edit it, we make better iterations of that idea, so we put older versions of that respective concept in the trash can. Or it does happen there is nothing to an idea, and better to move on.
But sometimes, we delete our ideas because we fear execution will never surpass how good our thoughts were in our minds. Who wants to end up with a shed when we’re building castles in the clouds?
And other times, we hide our ideas in the trash can so we won’t face our fears. What if other people would laugh? Say there’s nothing to it? A waste of time. Somebody else has done it before, and ten times better.
For those times, remember the little boy’s words from the gentle children’s book, What Do You Do with an Idea?
And at first, I believed them [other people]. I actually thought about giving up on my idea. I almost listened to them.
But then I realized, what do they really know? This is MY idea, I thought. No one knows it like I do. And it’s okay if it’s different, and weird, and maybe a little crazy.
There is a question in One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way that could help us in handling shunned ideas:
If you are unhappy but aren’t sure why, try asking yourself this: If I were guaranteed not to fail, what would I be doing differently? The question’s whimsical quality makes it safe for the brain to answer truthfully.
And so, perhaps we should try this introspection exercise once in a while:
If I were guaranteed not to fail, what idea that I dismissed would I be doing now?