Ideas don’t have to be good.

I was in a brainstorming session with some coworkers today, and one of them shared a thought that she described as “quarter-baked.” As in, not even half-baked. I loved the term, but even more I loved the fact that she shared the idea anyway. It bounced off someone else, gathered momentum, ricocheted off someone else, and by the end of the meeting we had a process in place for a new initiative that would save us a ton of time and effort.

People are far too afraid to share their quarter-baked ideas.

Even in designated “brainstorming” spaces, too many people are afraid to “think out loud.” They want their ideas to be perfect (or at least complete) before they share them. Don’t do it. Don’t hoard your thoughts, especially when creativity is the watchword.

If you have to put a disclaimer on your vocalized thoughts in order to feel confident enough to share them, do so. Nothing wrong with it. Just say, “this is just a quarter-baked idea, but…”

It’ll never bake the rest of the way unless you put it in the oven.

I just saw an absolutely fascinating question posed on Twitter. The question is: “Assume you’re having difficulties finding a serious romantic partner. You meet someone who’s all the things you want, except you’re not attracted to them. There’s 0 spark. Would you take a drug (dosed weekly) that induces attraction to this person so you could be with them?”

I just have so many thoughts about this question and its implications that I felt I had to use space here to think them out loud.

First, my answer is an enthusiastic “yes.” Let me begin by actually drawing on an exercise I often use with my clients when doing career exploration. I tell my clients to draw a circle and divide it into some number of sections – somewhere between 4 and 8, doesn’t really matter. Then I tell them to fill in the slices with things they think make a “great job.” Common choices are: Satisfying Work, Great Boss, Good Wage/Salary, Location, Good Company Culture/Reputation, etc. We explore how each of those things matters, but there will always be trade-offs and you need to be prepared to examine those trade-offs in order to find a career you really love.

Now, some simple math here: if you have two people and they draw identical charts, but then one of them wakes up and decides that “Location” doesn’t really matter to them at all and they’re removing it from consideration, then that person has more options. It’s as simple as that. There’s absolutely a meta-trade-off between how many trade-offs you’ll accept and how many options you’ll have.

Now, the same thing can apply to romantic partners. Your “circle” could includes slices such as: Shared Values, Personal Ambition, Intelligence, Charm, Appearance, Social Status, Wealth, or any number of things. But if two people draw the same circle and then one of them gets to just remove ANY of the slices, that person will have more options overall. Simple math, no judgement attached.

Now, think of it another way – for better or ill, many people consider “wealth/income” (or at least wealth/income potential) as a factor for their ideal romantic partner. So imagine if the question was framed “You meet someone who’s everything you want, except they’re destitute through no fault of their own (i.e. they’re not lazy or irresponsible). They’re otherwise perfect. Would you date them if some organization was willing to give them a stipend equal to 50% more than the median income in your area while they dated you?”

What these questions both do is essentially take that slice of the circle out of the equation. Now, for some people, that slice is already absent. Some people don’t have “attractiveness” or “wealth” in their circle at all. Other people have it as a very large slice. People are so varied and strange and cool that anything you think is odd or unusual might very well be so in terms of statistical representation, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or that it doesn’t work for those people. So when I tell you that there are already people who care absolutely zero about their partner’s appearance or income and are perfectly happy, don’t scoff just because you don’t feel the same way.

Or think of it like the career example, because that might be easier to wrap your head around: imagine that no matter what job you took, you’d get a decently above-average salary. Wouldn’t that significantly expand the number of jobs you’d consider taking? Surely there are several jobs that you know you’d love and would meet all the other criteria, but you don’t take because they simply don’t provide you with the amount of income you require. So by simply removing one of the many criteria you use to make such a decision, you broaden your pool.

So basically the interpretation I have is a straightforward one – anything that increases the mathematical likelihood of me achieving my goals without undue side effects is generally a good thing. So why then would anyone not say “yes” to the initial question?

I can think of two primary reasons: Associated Effects, and Moral Purity.

By “associated effects,” I mean the fact that no quality about a person truly exists in a vacuum. For instance: your healthy habits absolutely affect your physical appearance and on average, people in better health tend to be found more attractive to others. So assuming I took this drug and found someone attractive no matter what, it’s still possible that I may decide that I don’t want to partner with someone with terrible eating habits, lack of personal care, a drinking problem, heavy smoker, etc. I might artificially find them attractive, but I don’t want them in my life. However! While I think that many other people may respond this way, I think this is discounted by the phrasing of the question itself: “someone who’s all the things you want.” For me, that would mean that they’re healthy and have generally positive habits, so that eliminates the possibility of someone who is unattractive because they smoke a lot of meth or drink ten liters of soda a day.

Then there’s “moral purity.” I think some people might simply have a problem with the artificial nature of it all. Certainly I have a certain ill feeling when I consider the reverse: if I imagine discovering that my partner loves everything about me but has to take a drug to not feel physically repulsed by me, that might make me feel a certain way. I wouldn’t want a partner to feel that way. But that line of reasoning forces a very base, chemical/biological reaction to carry a lot of romantic weight! I mean, consider this scenario: you meet someone who you find wildly attractive. There’s 100% spark – but you despise everything else about them. By your definition, they’re a terrible person who would rank a 0 in every other category in your pie chart. Yet the spark is undeniable. Would you call that “love?” Would you date that person? Marry them? Would you advise a friend or family member in that situation to just take the plunge because truly they must be “the one?”

Certainly not! But if 100% Spark and 0% Everything Else isn’t love, then why should we say that 0% Spark and 100% Everything Else isn’t love? Find a couple that’s been married for 50 years and is still moon-eyed over each other, and I guarantee it won’t be because of “spark.” It will be because of lasting, enduring partnership built on all those other pie slices.

My honest guess is that if such a drug were invented and some people took it, it could wear off in six months and no one would notice. People who are fundamentally compatible bond, and whether that bond endures or not has to do with the people within it and the circumstances around it, not the spark. The whole reason we even use “spark” as a metaphor is because a spark doesn’t sustain – it either ignites something else or goes out.

So if the only thing standing in the way of you and something amazing is one tiny detail that is almost guaranteed to be temporary – physical attractiveness in a partner, a long commute for a job, the color of the paint on the walls of your dream home – just pretend that pill exists, and take it.

When a problem is easy, we see a solution clearly. That clarity solidifies the answer into a single point in conceptual space – no fuzzy outer area, no grey borders between right and wrong. Two plus two equals four.

So in our minds, we often associate “easy” with “clear.” Thus, we apply an equal reversal to both concepts: if “easy” is “clear,” then “difficult” must be “ambiguous.”

Hogwash. But easy to understand how people get there. They see a big, complicated problem and because the answer isn’t clear, they assume that the answer must also be “somewhere in the middle” or some such nonsense.

To be certain, some problems in your life will have answers that aren’t clear. It’s not wrong to acknowledge that. What’s wrong is thinking that every difficult problem you face lacks a clear, single answer just because it’s difficult to figure out what that answer is.

Most humans are so bad at determining cause and effect that we actually get it exactly backwards. Not only do we fail to identify the correct causes for the effects we’re examining, we actually mistake the effect for the cause in the same chain.

If you’re frustrated by something, try saying out loud the effect that frustration has on your life. Then reverse the two and see if that sentence helps explain your frustration. Here’s an example of a frustration: “Girls won’t talk to me.” So here’s what that sentence looks like if you say out loud the effect this has on your life: “Girls won’t talk to me, so I’m bitter and mean.”

Now flip it around: “I’m bitter and mean, so girls won’t talk to me.”

If there’s a lightbulb floating over your somewhat embarrassed face, then congratulations. A moment of introspection has given you a better course of action.

Let’s try it again: “I never get promoted.” The effect it has on you: “I never get promoted, so I half-ass my job.” The Flipside: “I half-ass my job, so I never get promoted.” Ahhhhhhhh.

Now, there’s definitely some “which came first, the chicken or the egg” going on here. But it doesn’t matter! Whichever came first initially, now eggs create chickens and chickens create eggs and that will go on forever unless YOU stop it. Don’t look for self-righteousness in blame or fault-finding. If the cycle is “I don’t get promoted, so I half-ass my job, so I don’t get promoted, so I half-ass my job, so I don’t…” then it doesn’t matter where it started – it matters where it ends.

And it ends with you, choosing a different course.

My co-worker told me a quick story about a client she’s working with: the client wanted to follow some creative pursuits away from her demanding career. She felt a particular burst of inspiration in that vein, and in that moment bought a desk plant so that she could associate that plant with the creative inspiration every time she looked at it.

I liked this, and it gave me an idea.

Imagine if every time you set a goal for yourself, you also bought a small plant to put in a window box or on a shelf in the sun. And you made a label with the title of the project, like “Exercise” or “Write That Novel” or something.

Then you only watered that plant on days when you worked towards that goal.

What would you have? A lush, growing forest of successfully completed or in-process tasks? Or a bunch of dead plants?

Imagine what this rule would do for your visualization of your ideas. First, you’d have a constant reminder to work on your goals every single day. Sure, the lives of the plants depend on it – but so does your life. The plight of the plants is just more immediate, more visible.

Second, it would be a great, intuitive way to see when you were taking on too many projects or ideas. You only have so much room in the sunlight for your plants, after all. Only so much time to water them. Oh yes, it’s a great idea to start painting again – but which plant will you move aside to make room for this one? Priority and focus are necessary in your life.

The tree that grows is the one you water. Treat your goals thusly.

There are two doors in front of you. One is unlocked and in fact wide open, and behind it is $100,000. The other is locked. You’re told that behind that door is $200,000, and the person telling you this offers to sell you a key to that door for the price of $125,000.

What’s the smart choice, here?

People are, in my experience, radically over-concerned with theoretical end results to the exclusion of both “what is actually happening” and “what is the cost to even approach the theoretical end result.”

You could just take the free $100,000. But many people just say “200k is more than 100k! Therefore, Door B is the better choice!” Absurd. Even if the key was cheaper, remember that you don’t even know that Door B has $200,000 behind it!

There are open doors all around you, and you can have a really great life by going through them. Don’t bash your head on the locked one just because you think something good might be behind there. Start with what works.

Once upon a time I worked in a regional convenience store chain. One of my many duties was inventory management, so I ordered the stuff the store ran out of. As a result, I learned a lot about pricing, and the difference between the price you see at the register and the more hidden supply chain prices.

This particular store did about 80% of its profit from one item – coffee. A cup of coffee at this chain ranges from $1 to $2 depending on size, from 12 oz to 24 oz. A pot of coffee made with one of the pre-packaged bags of coffee I would order would make about 100 ounces, give or take. I ordered those pre-packaged bags by the box, and 500 came in a box.

The price to my store for that box was $9.

Do the math. You could take everything else in the store and throw it in the gutter and the store would still bring in a profit, even accounting for overhead, payroll, and all those other pesky operating expenses. In fact, one of the marketing lessons we learned there was that pretty much every item we sold was just a way to get people in the store to buy coffee. Every promo for any item included “buy this item and get any size coffee for just one dollar!” or something. Because even at a dollar for 24 ounces, it was hugely profitable.

Okay, that’s background. That’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is that one time I had the chance to talk to a senior executive at the company and I asked him a question that had been on my mind: Given that competition between coffee chains is SO competitive, and given that we have SO much profit margin to work with, why don’t we sell our coffee for 50 cents or something for a little while just to capture more of the market share? Since our per-unit profit was so huge and our marginal unit cost so low, surely halving our profit-per-unit but quadrupling unit sales would be good?

His answer was really interesting: they had tried it! And sales went way down.

There’s a lot of psychology behind buying decisions, and a lot of historical information affects that psychology. It’s not just an in-the-moment calculation. If people were robots, then seeing a lower marginal unit cost would increase sales in a straight line, no questions asked. They’d done a good bit of research into why that hadn’t happened, though. Here’s what they found:

1. The customer was used to a certain price range for coffee. They were “anchored” to that price. A temporary reduction in price due to a sale was fine, because people “get” sales. But just reducing the price in a way that seemed permanent made people question why the price was going down. Had the quality of the coffee decreased? And if not, were they being ripped off before?
2. Even outside of the relationship with just our brand, the “anchor” effect to a particular kind of product or service is strong. Regardless of brand, people think “a fancy cup of coffee is about 5 bucks, a decent cup of coffee is about 2 bucks, and a cup of crappy gas station coffee is about 75 cents.” So if you sell your coffee for 75 cents, people are going to put it in the category of “crappy gas station coffee” no matter what you do. And just because it’s cheaper than good coffee doesn’t mean it’s a better value in the eyes of the customer – if that were true, everyone would buy their coffee exclusively from Big Al’s Gas-n-Go.

That second point has all sorts of interesting effects in the world outside of coffee chains. If someone invented a fantastic car tomorrow and their process was so good that they could sell the car to the end user for two thousand dollars, it would be really difficult to sell. People’s intuition is that “any car that costs $2k is a beater/junker” so seeing that price tag tells them that about your car even if there’s no other reason to believe it.

There’s one place in our society where this particular psychological effect is doing major, serious harm to really huge swaths of our society: higher education.

You see, the proliferation of university education for the last half-century or so has created another “price anchor” for our society, which is “self-improvement that benefits your job productivity and career prospects costs about $80,000.” The effect of this on the individual is that we see something that gives us new, marketable skills for sixty thousand dollars as “a good deal,” but something that gives us new, marketable skills for five hundred dollars is “obviously a scam.” The price point of more efficient personal development is simply too many standard deviations below the societal price anchor for most people to trust it. The societal price anchor is much slower to adjust than actual productivity.

Don’t be a societal pessimist. It’s fine to examine a new thing that seems great, and you don’t have to leap on every single new option that comes along. But the things society provides the individual really are getting so much better, so much faster than you could imagine. Seven billion people are absolutely falling over themselves to compete to make your individual existence so amazingly great, and the compound effect of that is staggering. Don’t ignore it – it’s all for you.

Many people get so focused on the things that can go wrong that they can’t even see what could go right.

Look, it’s fine to do a solid risk assessment. It’s fine, good even, to be cognizant of the potential hurdles and obstacles. But they’re hurdles and obstacles – they aren’t the main event.

Start by saying “If everything goes exactly right, if nothing prevents me from attaining my goal – what does that path look like?”

The reason this is so powerful is that 90% of obstacles don’t actually have to be dealt with. You can just go around them, because they don’t matter. You don’t have to fix all the potholes on the way to your destination. You can just drive around them and keep going.