Imagine with me for a moment you are George Lucas. You are leaning back on your expensive black executive chair staring at a picture of yourself holding a light saber wondering, ‘How can I make something that good again.’ You notice a picture of a duck on your desk and it hits you. THAT’S IT! You need a duck that’s a superhero. And so the world was forced to endure Howard the Duck. Are your ideas like these? When I wrote recently on 4 ways to come up with cool ideas I thought how do we know if we have suckful ideas?

How to know your ideas suck

The main way you can tell is not because they don’t work… ignore that. Many good ideas don’t work. That’s another post for another day. There are two things I think that can give you a clue. The first thing is you have no critical voice. I love my wife because she is 100% pessimistic. You would never meet someone who is more negative that she is. Whenever I am about to do something I ask her: What’s wrong with this? She usually answers with something I didn’t think of because I am very optimistic (utopia nutters). I only see what’s good in most things I am doing. If you have no critic there is no way of telling how much your ideas suck. Find a critic. They are worth their weight in gold.

This may confuse you but you really know your ideas suck if nobody is willing to criticise them. I think most people don’t like hurting other people. If you have written a book and people look at it and say ‘that’s good’. Keep searching. Ask why is it good? Why is it bad? Why does it work so well? I have to call out blogs on this one. I don’t know how many times I have read a blog post and there are 75 comments of people saying ,’wow what a great post.’ Not one (if you’re lucky) voice that is looking for what’s wrong. You need that. I have had it on this blog and it always makes me think. Sure, I don’t like it at first but after I have taken out my frustration on the Wii I feel better.

What you can do to stop your ideas from sucking

There are many ideas you can use to stop sucking. The first that comes to mind is to create a mastermind group. They say iron sharpens iron. If you can find two others or more than I recommend using them as a bouncing board. I have three people in my life that I run things past before I do anything. I learned this from failing in business… I suggest you implement this as well. Another thing you can do is walk into the bathroom, look into the mirror and say, ‘you are smart as you are handsome but you don’t know everything.’ It will do you the world of good.

In closing this I want to say that stopping your ideas from sucking means that you get feedback, critique and other points of view involved. You can become so excited about something that you don’t even realise that you are getting emotional with it and thus clouding your judgment. Remember, if your ideas suck it’s because you don’t have enough perspective. Get some.

As the great former leader singer of House of Pain once uttered, ‘I am fed up.’ The latest in mind numbing lack of creativity from the publishing monolith is yet another technological solution to a social problem. Presenting Kindle. I am using this to demonstrate with I think is a discernable lack in creativity of an industry that is increasing going up it’s own pipes. So why is this so uncreative?

This is not the problem it’s part of the problem

A few years ago the great Stephen King attempted to sell his Plant novella (still unfinished I might add) online through what many thought was a clever system at the time. The problem? The honor system. Apparently it wasn’t worthwhile to write something for online audiences. In plain English, you can’t take what people expect to be free and sell it to them. The problem: the publishing and writing world is notoriously unfair. It’s dog eat dog eat publisher eat author eat audience. We needed a different way of doing things.

Authors are no different

I recently read about the Sobol prize being cancelled for a lack of interest. Even more evidence of a lack of creativity. Sure, there are probably other reasons for the prize being canned. But for a lack of interest? Where are the next generation of writers? Blogging, reading their ‘e-novel’ on their ‘Kindles’… I doubt it. Whatever happened to writing a few good short stories and having them accepted and moving on from their. Hardly none of the publishing industry have done anything about the way it operates (including the authors who are a part of the system) for over 100 years. I haven’t seen one single non-technical innovation from the publishing industry. So now we have Kindle… great we can read the latest novels on an e-reader that feels like a book. Wow. How’s that going to sustain a failing industry? How’s it going to feed forward to the next generation of creative writers? It’s not.

What we can do about it

I have no idea. I am guessing that the majority of the 1/10 of 1% of authors that write books make money and don’t want things to change. The creative thinker says: ‘what can we do differently that we haven’t done before that would attract new talent to take the torch forward.’ How can we address the imbalance so that people who are considered to be unpublishable, at least have a shot at making it. The same goes for the film, art and other creative industries as well.

The non-creative plague

Think of the countless movies, television shows, books and the like that are the same old same old. Whatever happened to making new things that were interesting or being innovative. See, this is what happens when you put the dollar ahead of the art. You wind up with an imbalance that gives precedence to formula and spits on creative endeavour.

What to do about it?

I am not sure anything can be done. Have we gone too far in the wrong direction? I can shoulder the blame at the university level and say… yes we should be teaching the next generation of creative people instead of feeding them into the meat grinder. I am still amazed at the amount of movies that are released last year that you can predict point by point. I think I am well and truly alone on this. Never mind… that’s why I took up blogging!

Start being creative today.  Burn your CUBE!  Get out there and create.  If your boss stops you… do it anyway.  You must do something.  The world is in a very non-creative state of affairs.  For the love of God… do it!