There is often too much pressure placed on finding the best ideas. Whatever you’re doing, it can be difficult to come up with good ideas at the right times. Often enough, the pressure alone can stifle truly great ideas from ever even surfacing. This past week for class, we were at the Three Dots space downtown. Now, I’d like to preface by saying that I’ve been hurrumphish in the past when we’ve had a change of location for class. It seemed to me that we would move to a cool space, but do the same work we had been doing before, only in a location that was much less accessible. That being said, I was thrilled with class in Three Dots last week. Not only was the space itself really neat, but the content, the meat if you will (or plant based meat alternative for all my vegetabros out there) was really unique, engaging, and inspiring. Anyway, back to my point. We spent some time last Wednesday doing an exercise that I found really worth while. For those that weren’t present, I’ll briefly summarize. Basically, we each picked a card that had on it some type of global issue, ranging from really large broad concepts to specific problems. Then we moseyed around the room placing sticky notes upon which we had written ideas for how to help combat each problem. However, we weren’t simply encouraged to put forth the best, most reasonable, or even practical ideas. Instead, we were told to put anything down that came to mind. Certainly if you did happen to have a reasonable or practical idea, you were more than welcome to use it, but we weren’t limited. One of the takeaways from this exercise is that good ideas come along with the bad. That sometimes, bad ideas are just as helpful as the good ones. I know for me personally, I only knew what colleges I liked until I went to one that I detested. Until that point, I was simply infatuated with all Universities (Univertices for you Bo Nickal), but after visiting one that fell short of my hopes, I was able to see more clearly what I was actually looking for in a school. This is the same concept that we toyed with last Wednesday. Sometimes you need to think about what won’t work in order to discover what will. In the end, don’t be afraid of your bad ideas and your mistakes, grow from them.
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