The Creativity Faucet

"Bad ideas are the clichés your brain has been overexposed to."

Julian Shapiro wrote a smart piece about the Creativity Faucet:

Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.

Because your pipe only has one faucet, there's no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.

Here’s his explanation for how this applies to creativity:

At the beginning of a creative session, see through every bad idea that comes to mind. Instead of being self-critical and resisting bad ideas, recognize that you must see them to completion.

Bad ideas, by the way, are often the clichés your brain has been overexposed to.

Once bad ideas are emptied, a surprising thing happens: better ideas begin to arrive. Here's my guess as to why: Once you've generated enough bad output, your mind reflexively identifies which elements caused the badness. Then it becomes better at avoiding them. You start pattern-matching interesting ideas with greater intuition.