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// Never Fall in Love (With an Idea)

Broken Heart from AdvertisingSunday is Valentine’s Day. Love is in the air. But beware. When it comes to creativity, love can turn into a toxic gas.

You see, there is one thing you should never do in the creative process. Never fall in love with your idea. It’s only natural to think that your idea is better because you came up with it. It happens to all of us. But as soon as you fall in love, you give in to that bias and become defensive to everyone who tries to change or build on it.

I’ve heard this put another way. Your baby is a monkey. You see, every new parent thinks their baby is the cutest in the world, and woe be onto the person who even implies otherwise. In this analogy, your baby is your idea. You can’t possibly see it the way other people do.

Ideas flow best through open minds. Unfortunately, when you’re in love, all you can think of is the object of your affection. That’s why they call it being lovesick.

Only in an environment of collaboration do the best ideas rise to the top. Instead of bickering about whose idea is better, a brainstorm session should be about throwing out every idea, see what parts stick and how to make the very best parts work.

So keep your objective in mind. Are you trying to be the smartest, most clever one in the room? Or are you trying to come up with the best idea?

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Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Friday, February 12, 2010, at 10:03 AM by James Hodgins. Filed in Solutions and tagged , , , , .
  • not_so_madman
    Great creative debates can create great work - it can also create "Mulligan Stew" when weak ideas are stirred into what was a great idea. Take the "Think Smalll" Volkswagen campaign by Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1959 (ok, most of you will need to Google it). The Creative director who presented it must have had sweaty palms showing the client a full-page newspaper ad with only a very small picture of the car at the bottom of a full-page ad. Ad Legend Hal Riney once did a remake of the ad after their client "might" have made changes - adding American flags to offset the negative connotation of a German car (in 1959), then adding a Country Club in the background to class it up, making the car larger to dominate the lower half of the page, greatly enlarging the logo, etc.
    Bottom line, make the changes and add the additions to improve the ad, not to satisy a whiney ego.
  • Spot on. The best advice I received early on in my advertising career was don't marry your ideas. That said, most of my ideas *are* always the best ones, but I let other people try to come to that decision on their own. ;)
  • I've come up with a system. If I have a really good idea, I wait a while to let some other ideas circulate. Then I throw mine out. I found that if an idea is brought up early, even if it's the best, the group wants to discuss for more time. It may be cheating, but sometimes I'm ok with that.
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