Idea & Iteration

It’s a mistake to think that creative people come up with brilliant ideas. A good idea by itself is nothing. Besides you don’t know whether the idea is good until you play with it. You can stress yourself out coming up with good ideas. Here’s a better approach: Find something you want to explore. I did this with how with how people experience a board game. How do they interact with the game mechanics and with one another? They try a low-stakes experiment. Abstract your idea down to its essential element. Create a really simple version of it. Play with it. Try something else. Maybe reverse things around. Don’t stress about trying to make something amazing. Just explore and have fun. It doesn’t even matter if your idea is a good one, or something stupid. The process of iteration is where the magic happens. Through the process of iteration a “good idea” is exposed for all of its weaknesses. And an idea that starts out pretty awful can become better through iteration.