Coaching practices for No Bad Ideas
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For No Bad Ideas, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I freeze at the start because every idea has to be a winner before I’ll even write it down, and the pressure to be brilliant from the first word leaves me staring at nothing, too scared of being dumb to begin.
- I come up with three or four decent ideas and then just stop, satisfied, like that’s the whole pool
- The second an idea pops up I’ve already told myself why it won’t work, so it dies before I’ve even finished thinking it
- I come up with three or four obvious options, one of them seems fine, and I just grab it
- The first decent idea shows up and I grab it and call it done
Practices that may help
- Deliberately generate bad ideas first
Start with the worst ideas you can think of — bad ideas are faster to generate and reveal hidden assumptions.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work - Go for quantity over quality
Set a raw count target — the goal is many ideas, not good ones.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Defer judgment during generation
Generate ideas with no criticism, then evaluate in a separate pass.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - Go for quantity first
Aim for a high number of ideas; the best ones tend to come later in the list.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - The obvious veto: reject the first three ideas before keeping any
Force yourself to generate more by vetoing the first plausible ideas — they are almost always the most obvious ones.
Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical - Collect everything that resonates — without editing
Build a practice of gathering ideas, images, sounds, and fragments without evaluating whether they are "good enough."
The Creative Act: Rick Rubin’s Approach to Making - Welcome wild and outrageous ideas
Explicitly invite the absurd — it’s easier to tame a wild idea than to enliven a dull one.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Harvest and cluster ideas after the session
The generation phase is worthless without a systematic harvest: sort, name, and prioritize the output.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Defer judgment during ideation
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Set a volume quota before judging
Commit to a minimum number of drafts or ideas before allowing yourself to evaluate any.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work
Related concerns
- When Brainstorming Rules Go For Quantity
Set a raw count target — the goal is many ideas, not good ones.
Go for quantity over quality
- When The Medici Effect Quantity Of Ideas First
Set an explicit quantity target — generate at least 20 ideas before reviewing any of them.
Maximize quantity of ideas before evaluating
- How To Generate More Ideas
Aim for a high number of ideas; the best ones tend to come later in the list.
Go for quantity first
- How To Have More Ideas
Aim for a high number of ideas; the best ones tend to come later in the list.
- When Deliberate Constraints The Obvious Veto
Force yourself to generate more by vetoing the first plausible ideas — they are almost always the most obvious ones.
The obvious veto: reject the first three ideas before keeping any
- When The Beginner Mind Creativity Quantity Before Quality
The best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas — originality rises with volume, so generate recklessly before selecting.
Quantity first: generate the most ideas possible before evaluating any
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.