This is a Poorly Written Article With a Lousy Premise

Bad ideas are the quickest way to something brilliant.

In July of 2008, Ben Folds fans (me included) were delighted at the news that Folds’ new album “Way to Normal” had been leaked more than two months ahead of its planned release date. The tracks were clearly in various states of polish, some sounding fully mixed, sweetened, and ready for radio, while others might as well have been recorded with a MacBook’s built-in microphone.

The lyrics of those unpolished tracks were a bit goofy, even for Ben Folds’ standards. One of my favorites, “The Bitch Went Nuts”, tells the story of a “Republican ex-fratboy” lawyer who brings his outspoken liberal girlfriend to a cocktail party at his boss’ house: “The bitch went nuts / I’ll never be a partner at this rate / Not with Jane-fucking-Fonda Junior as my date.”

The jokier-than-normal lyrics led some to speculate that the album leak itself was a joke. Then, a month after the tracks had been leaked, Folds came clean and admitted that almost all of the songs on the “leak” were indeed fake.

“The word ‘fake’ came up when we started doing it and it takes all the responsibility out,” he told Rolling Stone. “You can just be free to write and let it go.”

The kind of creative liberation Folds is describing is, more or less, the mantra of The Upright Citizens Brigade, the legendary improv troupe and theater (and my favorite way to spend $10 on any night of the week in New York): Don’t think.

The idea behind don’t think is this: Too frequently we hamper our own creativity by setting the bar for what comes out of our brains unreasonably high. In the case of an improvised performance, if you wait for your brain to produce the perfect thought before stepping on stage and speaking it, you’ll keep the audience around for a long time. Don’t think. Go with the thought in your head. It probably won’t be bad. But it’s okay if it is. This is all fake.

On his fantastic podcast, You Made it Weird, comedian Pete Holmes interviewed comedy writer Megan Ganz about (among a ton of other things) her move from writing for NBC’s “Community” to ABC’s “Modern Family.” “The first thing I had to learn was to stop editing what I thought were ‘bad’ jokes,” she says. “ I will pitch things now that I would have never said out loud before and people will genuinely like.”

And then Holmes finds the golden nugget: In a TV comedy writers’ room,

“The way to a good joke is paved with bad jokes.”

One of your ‘bad’ ideas might be the crucial stepping stone on the way to the perfect idea.

A common refrain to hear in a group brainstorming session is “there are no bad ideas.” But anyone who has been in a brainstorm where this is said has seen what happens when a bad idea is lobbed out there. Somebody nods their head and chirps “okay” in a tone that says “let’s hear from someone else” and the idea is unenthusiastically written on the white board. Tar and feathers would have been a warmer reception.

Maybe a better way to approach brainstorming and other first-draft thinking is to say “there are no good ideas.” This doesn’t mean that you have to boo, hiss, and heckle each and every proposal. But it sets the expectation that you’re not to censor yourself for fear of something dumb popping out. If they’re all bad ideas, the downside disappears and all you’re left with is the upside–the possibility that some idea you thought was terrible is actually a home run.

I got an email tonight with the subject line: “Medium invites you to write.” I was excited, as I had been looking forward to trying Medium for a while, but my first thought was that I didn’t know what to write.

My second thought was to write about this and to publish it immediately. It’s probably a bad idea.