#80 - The "Best" Ideas
It’s interesting to always think about what the “Best” ideas are. People have ideas and sometimes they are “opinions”. Yet, they aren’t always the best ideas. Just the best for them in their context, time of life, and just subjective opinion. However, today I am going to talk about ideas that serve more than one purpose. And it all started last week when I was researching Game Designer Interviews and came across this quote by Shigeru Miyamoto in a Japanese Interview. This is what he stated, and I’m paraphrasing:
The Best Ideas Ideas are the ones that solve more than one problem.
And I just absolutely enjoyed this quote. Ideas can serve as tools in a toolkit. Or better yet, they can behave as options and you ultimately have to sacrifice other ideas for the sake of just a few. It’s these tradeoffs of what to focus on, what to think about, what to spend energy on, what to care about, and what to invest in that are all important. So, what if there is an idea that you are not pursuing and it could do more than the current idea that you are? It’s a captivating thought. Other times though, sometimes as humans we need to find the absolute important things in life, capture them, and just devote all your time to perfecting them. That way, they make everything else they are connected to better. Or better yet, all the other things or ideas that you are doing can support this main idea. Hey, that’s not a bad thought!
Other times, the best idea isn’t even the “Best”, it’s just the one you chose. If you have to choose between certain things and they all have pros and cons, then you are ultimately sacrificing one thing for another and it doesn’t make a difference what you choose. You just need to make a decision and stick with the best idea that you have chosen at that moment and just proceed forward. On the contrary, sometimes the best ideas that we have aren’t well researched, and so we continue refining or updating the ideas that we have about a subject/concept/thing. This leads us to continuing “rediscovering the best idea”, because we don’t know everything about a topic or context and reality just keeps on surprising us with new information.
I too have been victim to the “Best Idea” type of thinking, It’s really provides awful tunnel vision to expanding my thinking and thinking more creatively. One often gets sucked into thinking “this is the only good idea”, “this is the way”, or “this is the only choice I have”, and that kind of polish is quite rare when it comes to quality ideas.
Sometimes though, “Just right” works too for ideas. If you can just achieve the passing bar, then that gives you enough information for what to do next. This is versus endless polishing or trying to achieve perfection in a specific way only to know that you may have to abandon this idea, because fundamentally you are going to go in a different direction.
Anyways, these are my thoughts. I meant to post last week, but wasn’t able to do so. Have a great week everyone!
-Calvin
