Revisit Bad Ideas
For years, I’ve kept a notebook that I carry with me at all times to record ideas.
At times this book has been a real, paper, physical notebook, and more recently it’s shifted to an app on my phone.
Over the years I’ve written down probably thousands of ideas, from fully mapped out business or product ideas to thoughts, phrases, or even single words that I found interesting at the time.
A lot of the ideas I write down are good, or at least interesting. Almost every blog post I write has its beginnings on this list, as do many of our products and offerings at Counterweight Creative.
But a lot of the ideas — when I revisit them sometimes only a day or a week later — are just bad. Sometimes even entirely nonsensical.
I don’t delete the bad ideas, however.
Occasionally, I’ll go back through my idea list to review and organize everything I’ve written down, and this practice always surprises me. What I’ve found is that often the ideas I thought of as “bad” at one point or another are often not, in fact, bad ideas after all.
Rather, with the perspective of time and different circumstances (sometimes I’ll go back a year or more), I find that while some ideas certainly were bad and are still bad, many of them were simply not a good fit for who I was or where I was at…
