A Small Ode to Shit Ideas
Sam Dickson is a Creative Director at CHE Proximity, Melbourne.
He believes in the inspirational power of shit ideas.
A small ode to shit ideas
The quest for the perfect idea…
Take a long shower,
go for a walk in the park,
flip through a D&AD annual from 1995.
Stare into the unfeeling abyss of a blank google doc and wish you were, in fact, an anonymous marmoset instead of a stupid fraud.
Sure.
But before you have an aneurism trying to write the best idea ever, try this genius:
Write a shit one.
I’ll explain.
If you’re any good, shit ideas bother you. Especially if they’re yours.
Their rough edges scrape against the inside of your brain and your sub-conscious can’t help but go into overdrive, grappling to make them smooth.
Normally this is a panicked process undertaken an hour before a review – you know the one: “fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck, fuck.”
But imagine if you accessed this creative reserve tank of jet fuel and meth with a little more time up your sleeve.
This is the power of the shit idea.
There’s only one catch – it can be shit, but it can’t be wrong: it has to answer the brief.
Go ahead, give it a go. Put your ego aside and park your imposter syndrome.
Pick up a brief and start solving it with as many unimaginative, contrived, overcomplicated, derivative, inappropriate, undercooked, overthought solutions as you can muster.
Then, marvel at the mess you’ve made and watch as your brain can’t help but do that thing it does where it starts to melt down and mutate things that don’t work, into things that do.
What you end up with is something better than a good idea – ‘good’ ideas suck, they populate the last ten pages of every deck that never gets presented more than once.
You end up with something new.
(Author’s note: the first draft of this article was twice as long and had about ten more poo-based metaphors – the system works. You’re welcome).
