The Backstory

Back in 1987—before CDs, iPods, the Internet, and eBay—I was a first year student in Virginia Tech’s architecture program. The program’s first phase was the Foundation, where they stret-t-t-t-t-tched our mind with design possibilities. And my first professor, Gene Egger, was max fabulous at making design possibilities happen.

The man wouldn’t let us use color for three months—he said we had earn it. No fasteners or glue for model building, either. From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, our world was pencil and black pens, white poster board, white paper, and clever assembly.

And so he kept us focused on the fundamentals of making things—not making things pretty—and we learned to handle materials the way they wanted to be handled. His offbeat rules had an amazing way of teaching us things we didn’t appreciate until much later.

Oddly enough, his lessons have helped me throughout my many detours, like developing websites and building databases. But the best of Egger’s lessons might be the most widely applicable: his 10% rule.

Only 10% of what you create is going to be worth looking at. So you better create a lot of things. Don’t make only 10 things and risk having only 1 thing to show. Make a hundred so you can choose your best from 10.

As you read on, think on how you can use this method to brainstorm your next product, a new service offering, that client’s logo, or a new tagline [Go GirlPie!].

The Assignment

After his proclamation (he never spoke, he always proclaimed), Egger sent us back to our desks to:

Draw 10 squares
We could draw them however we liked, so long as we didn’t draw a typical 4-sided box, they were all different, and we didn’t take too much time. So I lightly penciled 10 1-inch squares on a sheet of paper and got to work filling them with inked dots, scribbles, smudges, fingerprints, whatever.

A bit later he called us back to the meeting room to display our collection of mini-masterpieces. Once they were hanging, he walked the wall and did his usual round of harrumph-correct-encourage-tease-taunt. Then he had us collect them, and

Choose one square we liked, and make 10 more squares just like it…but not exactly like it
The drawing style or technique we used for our favored square was now a theme, and I found it tricky—but satisfying—to repeat it 10 times without duplicating it.

Soon after, Egger rounded us up again to show off the new families of squares. He was content with the results, and congratulated us on our cleverness, our variety, and our stamina. And then he told us to

Go make 100 of them
As they say in the South, we liked to’ve died. Imagine the sound of 24 jaws hitting 24 desks and 1 professor cackling and rubbing his 2 hands together. He was the best kind of wicked.

And so I spent the rest of the morning drafting a faint 10 x 10 grid and a long night thoughtfully crafting 100 different inked squares.

And—as you’ve already guessed—Egger was right.

The Results

Most of the 100 squares were OK
But just okay. Not thought-provoking, not well-designed, not well-drawn. Just meh.

Some of the 100 squares were really nifty
Who knows…maybe I jumped to a new string of ideas, or worked my way up to a good’un, or just got out of my own way. But some of them were interesting to look at. It seemed that if you looked long and hard enough, you’d find a whole world in there.

A few of the 100 squares were amazing
After drawing dozens of them, I got good at it. My drawing technique strengthened and the theme solidified. I was drawing a lot less and creating a lot more. And every so often, I’d make a square that shimmered with craftsmanship.

The Takeaway

A fabulous way to drag the best bits from all the corners of your mind or all the people in your workgroup: Find 100 ways.

You don’t need a new product idea. You need 100.

You don’t need a new service offering. You need 100.

You don’t need a logo idea for a client. You need 100.

And GirlPie had 65 super-yum taglines for Naomi, but when it’s your turn to make a tagline, you need 100.

You need 100 of whatever you’re creating so you can feel free to create stuff that sucks. Sitting there trying to invent one great-and-most-perfect thing can drain your creative juices and tie your thinking cap in knots.

It’s far better to plan for 100 so you can look at the first six (that might be complete crap) and know your plan includes 94 more opportunities to get it right.

It’s also easier, funner, and effective-er to design generously, to lavishly and carelessly cover a cocktail napkin/legal pad/whiteboard/moleskine with miles of potential suckage, knowing the odds are in your favor that you’ll find 10 well-crafted options in the end. And if you’re having a really good day, you’ll hold 1 that’s purely brilliant.

But most of all it’s important to do any amount of what you want to get done. Doing however much you can manage is better than doing nothing at all because—

What’s 10% of nothing?

Et tu? What do you think? Is creating 100 things excessive, utter brilliance, or somewhere in between?

Tagged as: Best of BBB

Photo credit: striatic