Shawn Blanc has been publishing a series of essays leading up to his new book and online course, The Focus Course. In a recent post, he writes about how we all need to get through more bad ideas. It’s easy to assume that because your friends’ lives appear perfect on Facebook, that you should reserve only your brilliant ideas for posting:
“One of the things that comes with having the internet in our pocket is that we can share moments and slices of our life with the world. But most of us are sharing the highlights. We share the best photos of the grandest places. Which is fine. But it also can cause a slight sense of disillusionment.”
The essay reminds me of something that always stuck with me reading about legendary Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones years ago. He said that when he was young, his father would give him and his siblings essentially unlimited paper to draw on, unused supplies from his business. We all have 100,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get through all the bad drawings — in Shawn’s essay, the bad ideas — the sooner we can start producing our best work.
