The Bad Idea List

Pick something you are stuck on. A song, a project, a decision, a message you cannot get right.

Set a timer for fifteen minutes and write fifteen ideas that are actively bad. Not safe. Not mediocre. Bad. If an idea would get you laughed out of the room, it counts.

The rule is that you cannot stop to evaluate. Fifteen, all the way through, no editing on the way.

Example. I was stuck naming a song and wrote these:
Name it after the worst thing in my kitchen
Name it a number nobody can pronounce
Give it the same name as a song that already exists
Name it after my dentist

Number three turned into a real idea about deliberately sharing a title with something famous. It only showed up because I was not trying to be good.

Now read your list back. Somewhere in there is one bad idea with a real one hiding inside it. Circle that one. That is the whole exercise.

Musicians write far more songs than they ever release. Bad ideas are not a detour around the good one. They are the route to it.

Borrow a Brain

Pick a problem you are chewing on. Then pick somebody who thinks nothing like you:

A mechanic
A seven year old
A diner waitress who has worked doubles for twenty years
Your most practical friend
A drummer
The person at work who annoys you most

Now answer the problem as them. Not the polite version of what they would say. What they would actually notice first, and what they would not care about at all.

Example. I had a marketing problem I could not crack, so I asked what a mechanic would say. A mechanic does not ask what the brand should feel like. A mechanic asks what is broken and what it costs to fix. That one reframe cut the problem in half.

The most useful one on that list is the annoying coworker. They are annoying because they weigh things differently than you do, which is exactly why they see the thing you keep walking past.

Improv taught me this one. You cannot play a character by describing them. You have to answer questions as them.

The Wrong Tool

Take something you are working on. A project, a pitch, a problem, a plan.

Now put it in the wrong container on purpose. Pick one:

A recipe
An obituary
IKEA assembly instructions
A missing pet flyer
A diner menu
Album liner notes
Terms and conditions nobody reads

The format fights you, and that is the useful part. A recipe makes you say what the ingredients are and what order things happen in. An obituary makes you say what it accomplished and who will miss it. Assembly instructions make you admit which step is confusing.

Example. I once wrote a positioning document as a diner menu. Appetizers were the quick wins, entrees were the real work, and the specials board was the stuff nobody had decided on yet. The specials board turned out to be the actual problem, and nobody had noticed because it had never had its own slide.

You find out what you actually think about something by trying to fit it somewhere it does not go.