And she was spontaneous and she was fun. What she thought was how much fun it would be sitting soaked in the old roller coaster or running around in the empty amusement park.

We didn’t go to the amusement park. I don’t remember what we did instead.

But if we had gone, I would remember it.

And this is the same thing that happens all the time in creative work. Someone throws out an idea and someone else quickly thinks up a bunch of reasons to shoot it down, instead of seeing where a more constructive response could get you.

That’s the thing with kids. They don’t feel embarrassed when they share their ideas. Children base their actions on impulses.

And they haven’t grown up hearing how stupid their ideas are.

Adults on the other hand are petrified of sounding stupid. So they think things through before saying them. And they expect others to do the same.

But when you’re creating something new, you need ideas. And you can’t just sit around expecting good ideas to show up. Normally, the only way to get to a good idea is through a thousand bad ones. In the process of creating something new, quantity is far more important than quality.

The time to be smart is when you have something concrete to be smart about. Ideas are always different for everyone who hears them. When I say “car”, I have my idea of a car and when you hear it, you have your idea of a car. Proposing a week-long car trip in the Alps may be stupid with my idea of a car, but brilliant with yours.

Not only is it often the only way to get good results, but being stupid also creates an atmosphere that’s essential to creative thinking, where you don’t need to be the responsible adult. Being stupid lets you not think about budgets, target groups or schedules. It lets you remember some awesome thing you saw the other day, or a stupid joke you heard one night sitting in a pub. And that might be just the thing to trigger the really great idea, the one that works in the real world, too.

Whoever was thinking about Star Wars when their job was to create an ad for Volkswagen wasn’t being very grown-up and responsible. Or whoever first suggested that building a big painting robot would be a good way to fight cancer.

So never underestimate the power of stupid; it can achieve some pretty awesome things.

The writer is a Lead Creative Designer at Activeark
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