Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Don’t Commit Too Early

Don’t think that your first, second, third, and fourth ideas are the best ones you can come up with. Try to generate as many ideas as possible without judging each individual idea too much (even a bad idea could be the impetus for a better one).

In psychology, the equal-odds rule states that any idea you come up with has about an equal chance of being a “good” idea. To many people, this is counterintuitive; you might think that you’d exhaust your well of good ideas and that the more ideas you generate, the quality of new ideas would go down. Or you might think that it would make sense to generate fewer ideas, but try to make the ideas you come up with better.

There’s plenty of research on this topic,^[49] and it always ...