Why ideas are terrifying

“To come up with a great idea you’ve got to come up with a lot of stupid ones,” said FNB CEO Michael Jordaan at the YFM event I attended the other night. His comment struck a chord with me because as it happens, I’d been thinking about ideas all day. Not so much ideas themselves, but the idea of ideas: the concept itself of a new thought germinating, then springing to life and changing the world. Or not.

The truth is that ideas are terrifying.

I know this because I do creative things like writing and painting, and I work in an industry that relies more than any other for its survival on generating new approaches to old problems. Problems, granted, that tend to be how to sell more tins of baked beans or insurance premiums, but problems that keep somebody awake, somewhere.

I work on the strategy side, which means that it’s my job to generate new insights into what might make consumers do what we want them to. What would make somebody eat more of this or buy more of that; that sort of thing. It also means that in the course of my work, I’ll never create anything more compelling than a PowerPoint slide; I’ll be covering the Loerie Awards next month and until very recently, I’d never actually held one, despite having worked in adland for over a decade. How sad is that?

I’m not sure I could handle working on the creative side though. The vast, overwhelming majority of ideas generated in an agency go precisely nowhere. They’re rejected during the brainstorming process, or the creative director thinks an idea “feels familiar”, or the strategist – that would be me – says it’s not on brand. Or, more often than not, because the client just doesn’t like it and “how about we do it this way?”

I honestly don’t know how the creatives do it. How do they pick themselves up and dust themselves off over and over again, despite the rejection? How do they put themselves, heart and soul, into work doomed to be stillborn?

Here is the central conundrum of ideas, the ultimate cruel truth about being somebody who must generate them for a living. To be capable of coming up with ideas, you have to care about them. Your heart has to flutter perceptibly at that moment of conception. Your chest must swell with the ozone reek of possibility in the air, when you’re not quite sure what is there waiting to be formed. To have a great idea is like being in love. You have to be addicted to thinking about it, playing with it, fantasizing about a life with it fully realised and whole — because without the nurturing of that passion, it will die.

But at the same time, if you care about your ideas too much, they will kill you. A part of you will die every time they come to nothing. Your hopes will surge and then plummet to the ground, you will become exhausted with the sheer effort of picking yourself up. Your soul will become calloused and you will care about nothing, and you will be incapable of creating anything at all.

It gets worse. For an idea to have any meaning, it must become real. It must be given weight and shadow. It must leave the realm of the imagination and enter into the world of touch and feel: the word made flesh. The most brilliant idea in the world is useless if that’s all it ever is, an idea. And it is this knowledge, that in order to turn ideas into something that can be grasped, that to be creative, you must care – but to care is to open yourself up to the possibility of heartbreak: this is what is terrifying.

Some of us, like Michael Jordaan, will be successful. Most of us won’t. Safer, then, to never care, and cultivate indifference, and at least have a chance at being content.