Great Ideas Come From Volume, Not Genius

The best creatives do not have better ideas. They have more ideas. Great ideas come from volume: if you have five post ideas, you will be lucky if one has the potential to go viral. If you have fifty, it is hard not to have at least one. The winners just take more shots.

Why more ideas beats better ideas

It is tempting to believe that talented people sit down and produce gold on the first try. They do not. They produce a lot, most of it forgettable, and then keep the good bits.

Volume is the mechanism. Each idea is a lottery ticket, and buying more tickets is the most reliable way to hold a winner. Chasing the perfect idea from a standing start is the slow way round.

Paul McCartney's terrible ideas, and one great one

Look at a page from Paul McCartney's notebook around May 1968 and you find a list of song ideas including "Clouds are stupid", "Do flies have noses", "Nothing like a kitchen bin" and "Didgeridoo: The Opera".

Buried in the middle of all that nonsense is "Hey Jude". He did not sit down and write one of the most beloved songs ever recorded. He wrote a huge messy list, and one of them happened to be a classic. The genius was in the volume.

What this means for your content

If your content is not landing, the fix is usually not to think harder about the one idea you have. It is to generate far more ideas than you think you need, then let the strongest one rise.

Ten ideas will not save you. A hundred will. Make more, judge afterwards, and post the best.

Work with us

Generating a high volume of genuinely funny, on-brand ideas, then filtering to the ones that will actually perform, is exactly what our team of comedy writers does all day.

If you would like a team that never runs dry for your brand, work with us.