One of my teachers told me about a student who was generally quiet, but when they spoke up, they said something brilliant. I always wished that quality for myself, but unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. That’s not how my brain works naturally. My good ideas are usually accompanied by bad ideas as well.

Shawn Liu writes at Good Enough:

The next time you’re coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let’s come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.

And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.

That sums it up well. A fair part of why I write every day is because I regularly fall into this rut.

“No, this idea’s no good, that idea’s awful too,” I tell myself. Except now, because I’m writing every day, the dialogue doesn’t end there. There’s a prompt, “…but I have got to publish something today, so I guess it’ll be this bad one.”

More often than not, I find that my initial assessment wasn’t accurate; the idea wasn’t bad at all. It just needed a bit more thought, a bit more energy. And a better one usually comes by the time I press publish. As Vin writes:

When I try to make the best thing, I become less happy, actually I become paralyzed. When I try to make the best thing, I drift away from my true nature, which is that, everything I make is just an expression of my [curiosity].

Even when the posts are bad—and many of them are—I’m okay with that. If that’s the cost to write the good ones that come out of this process, and there are many of those too, then it’s worth it to me. I’ll just talk about the good ones more, and leave the bad ones alone.