There, I said it.
Okay, there are some genuinely bad ideas. But within a creative space, there’s virtually nothing you can do that’s a genuinely bad idea. (Although don’t do homophobic, racist, transphobic, etc. shit. That’s a bad idea, not just creatively.)
Look, if there can be a movie with the tagline “Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States,” I don’t think your ‘bad idea’ is all that bad, you know what I’m sayin’?
I’ve had my share of bad ideas. Like the time I wanted to be a YouTuber.
Or the time I wanted to do a video podcast about Iron Man from a transhumanist perspective.
Or when I wanted to vlog, using the Snapchat Spectacles.
And look, none of these ideas were bad per se. And I enjoyed making them. I didn’t stick with either (or the hundreds of others I didn’t stick with) because I was bad at them. I didn’t know anything about talking to a camera. Hell, I didn’t even know how to frame a shot. I knew nothing about editing. Or pacing. Or about a myriad other things that is involved in making videos.
I know more now. I still don’t do video. (1k words non-withstanding. It’s coming!) Because I’m a writer. But that doesn’t mean the idea was bad, it was just misapplied. And I didn’t follow through.
To get anywhere in creativity, you have to suck first. You have to be willing to be bad to get better. Even in writing, I’ve tried NaNoWriMo multiple times, failing each time. Not because writing is a bad idea, or because I don’t know how to write, or because I don’t have ideas.
But because A) I didn’t follow through, and B) I wasn’t ready to be bad.
Looking back on these bad ideas, I cringe but not because the ideas are bad. I still would want to do regular book reviews. I still would love to talk about Tony Stark from a transhumanist perspective. I still would love to do NaNoWriMo. (I do not want to vlog using the Spectacles. 🤣)
There are no bad ideas (caveat above) but only not recognizing what you can and can’t do. And still, you have to learn what you can’t do the hard way, you have to go out and embarrass yourself. (Maybe don’t upload it to YouTube and announce it on all socials. Trust me, it’s a pain to remove all those posts. And people do see them.) Keep bad writing, bad photos, bad videos to yourself. But never ever think about not doing them.
