Sometimes Your Biggest Mistake Ends Up Being Your Greatest Idea
"Wrong Answer"
Sometimes, we are so quick to delete drafts, lose voice notes we leave for ourselves, or for some of us - write things down on a notepad just to discard them later when it’s time to clean up the “mess”. Quick to dismiss what could’ve been our next greatest idea, not knowing what it was going to lead to; cutting our potential outcome by 100%, as crazy as it sounds.
Though, if we asked you right now creatively who told you what a mistake is? And at what point? It would be hard to pin down, since there is no clear definition of what a mistake actually is. After all, everything is subjective. So what you might see as a mistake could have a line of a thousand people waiting two years down the road, while you’re still on the road.
Or maybe it’s that fleeting feeling when something about the work just feels off? You can’t put your finger on it, but for some reason; call it intuition, call it whatever you’d like - you think it’s wrong, and your only way to make peace with it is to scratch it entirely, before weighing all the other possible outcomes. Kinda unfair, to be honest.
But think once again before you delete it! you literally wrote or recorded something that didn’t exist before, bringing life into something that could change plenty of lives throughout history. And we just choose to discard it, and with it, subconsciously, we also discard part of our self-worth when it comes to generating ideas.
You see, by deciding to scratch everything, it’s almost as if you’re telling your brain, your inner creative - that the workand ideation that it gives you every single time is worth nothing. So over time, we believe, the skill of generating new ideas will not survive the millions of scratches. And we’re not talking about the deliberate ones, since there is a difference here. Of course not everything is meant to exist, but not everything should be discarded either.
Picture this! we don’t know if it’s ever happened to you; but you have an idea, you discard it, and then a month later you see someone else acting on it? Would you feel some type of way about it? If so, you just proved our point. There is potential in anything we put out there. It’s like energy; and energy doesn’t just disappear. If it does, that’s on your science teacher for not doing a good job. She didn’t put much “energy” into it, we guess.
So what if the mistake isn’t the idea itself, but how fast you judge its potential? It’s a nice reframe; and something worth looking into.
If we actually choose to look at our notes as a stage in the creation process- from the perspective of “this is where we are right now” rather than treating it as the finished idea; we can start seeing it as a process, almost a journey from inception to completion.
Maybe a “bad” idea is just something that hasn’t been developed past that stage yet, and isn’t necessarily aligned with where we are right now. So instead of discarding it immediately, we just need to work around it. It’s like making a skirt - you wouldn’t throw out the idea of the skirt just because you didn’t like the pattern. Do the same with an idea! Keep the core, change the narrative around it. You already put so much work into ideating something - you might as well make something out of it.
Look at us now - the pool of ideas is unlimited, and with time, we will start connecting the dots, pulling from each one of them, ensuring we always have something new to offer. Something that is needed.
The Mercer Edition Is An Independent Publication.