QuoteProject
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
David Brin
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Creativity involves trial and error, requiring many failed ideas before achieving brilliance.

David Brin highlights the nature of creativity, emphasizing that the process often involves generating numerous poor ideas before arriving at something exceptional. He suggests that a willingness to explore even the silliest concepts is crucial for original thought, as fear of failure can stifle innovation.

Themes

CreativityIdeasInnovationFailureOriginality

In practice

Example use cases

During a brainstorming session to encourage team members to propose wild ideas without fear of judgment.

More from David Brin

Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
David BrinRead
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
David BrinRead
Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
David BrinRead
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David BrinRead
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
David BrinRead
Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
David BrinRead

Similar quotes

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
John CleeseRead
When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good, orderly direction.
Julia CameronRead
When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.
Will SelfRead
I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.
Jennifer EganRead
I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
E. L. DoctorowRead
I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.
Philip PullmanRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.