John Vorhaus, Author/Speaker/Artist/Screenwriter: The path to a good idea is through a bad idea,
you might not be agreeable to that, you might say well that seems like a lot of
hard work and frustration, heartbreak, heartache, why should I do that?
Film Courage: Where does a great idea begin?
John: Usually with a bad idea, usually I have to pass through a lot of bad ideas to get to a great
idea. We talked earlier about the rule of nine says ten for every 10 jokes you try nine won't
work same is true for ideas you might have 10 ideas for a sitcom or a screenplay and if you
look at all 10 of them you can just say well some of these are better than others which one's the
best one at that if you have 10 ideas and you pick the one you like best you might not have a great
idea but you have the best of 10 ideas that's why it's so important to generate a lot a lot a lot of
ideas most of them will fall by the wayside in my vocabulary there's something called a Monday idea
a Monday idea is something that sounds great on Monday but by the end of the week you don't even
know why you're so excited about it it's like a hit song that sounds great at first but then
pretty soon you can't stand it you realize there's nothing really there we fall in love with things
because they're new and the great ideas are the ones that stand the test of time and the weight of
development I'll give you an example of something that I consider to be a great idea that it's new
to me in my experience then I'll talk about where this one came from because they don't always come
from that strategy that I just gave you I'm walking with a friend we're walking our dogs
and my friend has a kind of a wild and and woolly look about him, he's an actor and he
looks a little deranged most of the time he's from Kentucky and I turned to him and I said it
I said it'd be a great idea for a movie Rasputin in Kentucky because you look like a Rasputin but
you're from Kentucky and you could totally play that role now I consider that to be a great idea
because it's it takes no effort to imagine the story around it there's a governor of the state
and he's being manipulated by some mad Rasputin type character it's basically the Rasputin story
taken from Zara's Russia and stuck in rural Kentucky where it's just gonna work a treat
so one way we recognize good ideas or great ideas is we can see the the bones of other good ideas
on top of them this race is a point that's worth raising people who are in the writing game are
very self-conscious about copying or being thought to copy or be derivative and that's nearly the
problem that we think it is and I offer as a as a counter narrative the artist's experience I'm
lately an artist I've been doing art for a few years now and I've started to understand that
for many great pieces of art the conversation starts with I like what I'm looking at I'm
inspired by that I want to do something like that and there's never any sense of and I'm copying
them or I'm going into areas that are cliched or not allowed to me just that artist painted a
beautiful field of poppies I want to try painting poppies too and there's no self-consciousness
around copying or turning soil that's already been turned I would say that a great idea is
not necessarily a new idea or an original idea a great idea is something that like I said can stand
the weight of development and stand the test of time what is a money idea you talked about Monday
ideas what about money what is a money idea a money idea in my personal vocabulary is an idea
that the minute you have it it's going to work and you can say I know it's going to make money
that that just makes it kind of a joke or a metaphor but let's say you're pitching sitcom
ideas to me I have a series I'm gonna make a sitcom called Rasputin in Kentucky because why not
and now it's a comedy and you're pitching ideas for Rasputin like episode ideas Rasputin goes to a
car wash Rasputin takes up pickleball and then you say Rasputin poses in the nude well that's a money
idea because the audience is going to really want to know that they're not going to see him naked
they know they're never going to but they know it's going to be an awkward situation for them
they know instinctively that it's going to be fun so I as someone who is evaluating ideas I can look
at that and say from here to that money moment that funny scene I can see the direct line and
that's why I say money idea and that's why I say let's put that into development and see if we can
make it happen another idea will come along that's not a money idea Rasputin cleans out his closet
I don't know how that's going to be funny until I know what he finds in the closet so it's not yet
a money idea but it could become one I'm going to offer you one more observation around this
when we see good ideas and somebody comes along and says the path to a good idea is through a bad
idea you might not be agreeable to that you might say well that seems like a lot of hard work and
frustration heartbreak heartache why should I do that because often you cannot get to the good idea
without passing through the bad idea and I didn't teach this I learned this from a student of mine
very early in my teaching career adult learners I said sometimes you have to pass through the
bad idea to get to the good one and she said oh it's like going on a blind date and I said well
what do you mean she said well he could be horrible but he might have a cute roommate
and you're never going to meet the cute roommate if you don't go on a bad blind date that's true
it it ties back into this notion of having a will to risk recognizing that bad outcomes are
not to be feared bad outcomes are just outcomes and in this business that we're in the currency
of the realm is outcomes the more times we make a thing whatever that thing is the more quickly and
prosperously we progress toward our goals creativity is carrying buckets to the river
what is this in eastern philosophy there is this notion that creativity is carrying buckets to the
river that there's a river of creativity flowing by and our job as artists is to dip into the flow
of creativity and see what we get and that's a valid approach it's like walking around waiting
for a joke to occur to you or waiting for an idea to occur to you you've had these moments
are you walking down the street and it's like you get hit by lightning suddenly a great idea
appears to you that's the experience of carrying buckets to the river and it's good as far as it
goes but it doesn't go far enough because I don't want to be creative just in the moment
where creativity takes me by surprise I want to be creative from nine in the morning till
five at night if I so choose so carrying buckets to the river isn't going to be enough I need to
build some irrigation channels I need to throw up a dam or two I need to use the raw stuff of
creativity more effectively from moment to moment so when I say carrying buckets to the river what
I'm really saying is develop a set of tools that will free you from the magic of creativity you can
benefit from the magic of creativity it's great to get hit by that lightning but you don't have to
be a slave to it you don't have to wait for it to strike as long as you have strategies for bringing
creativity to you every time you want I can't tell you how many wonderful ideas I would get
sitting in morning traffic rush hour traffic could be a Monday and then the minute you actually have
time to implement them you find a million things to do to keep yourself busy do why it's fear fear
okay it's fear resistance I'm not I don't know if that's true for you but nine times out of ten
when someone has trouble executing if you look at it hard enough they're afraid of the outcome
and you can see this in a lot of situations having trouble starting and having trouble finishing are
both manifestations of fear let's look at having trouble finishing I've written this novel and
it's time for me to do what Winston Churchill said kill the beast and fling it to the public
but I'm afraid I'm afraid of bad outcomes I don't know I'm afraid because I'm not self-monitoring
so I look at what I've written and I say all the ending doesn't work or this is all trash I need
to go and start over again I'm not satisfied I'm not going to release it until it's perfect this is
perfectionism disguising fear it's fear cloaked as it needs to be perfect before I let it go first of
all it's never going to be perfect because nothing is and secondly the only reason you're afraid to
let it go is not because it's not perfect but because you're afraid of a negative outcome
can I tell you about a negative well a stalled outcome that I've been surfing now for months
last year I wrote a screenplay a feature animation for a German client I work internationally it's
in English but it's for a German client and I delivered a draft of the screenplay and it
didn't work and I agreed that it didn't work and I went back and rewrote it and
I delivered it again day before Halloween that was four months ago five months ago and I have
not until today it actually even today haven't heard one word about whether they like it or not
and you might say that's very rude of them but I just say that's an outcome there is an outcome
out there that I don't know about and even if I do know about it it's not going to change how I
feel about myself I'm content to wait today they emailed me and they said now that everybody's
healthy again oh I didn't know people were sick we want to have a meeting on it okay sure let's
do that but now look I'm going into a meeting where I as a writer have a tremendous emotional
investment in what those guys say and I have a feeling they wouldn't be calling this meeting
if all they wanted to say was we love every word of it put down your tools and do a dance but that
would be great but that seems like an unlikely outcome so I'm already prospecting the future
I'm already investigating what that meeting will be like in my mind so that when I'm in
that meeting I can operate effectively not as a slave to my emotional reactions but in service
of the work which ultimately is in service of my ego there's a lot going on I'm sorry I
went around the corner down the street like I usually do no no that's fascinating so you waited
four or five months or so haven't heard anything and now they'd like to call a meeting so all this
time you've been waiting not knowing where you stood yes but I haven't been holding on to it the
way I would have held on to it in my youth this is the important thing I actually had a friend write
a friend called me the other day you still haven't heard I still haven't heard must be driving you
insane it's not bothering me at all I'm not even thinking about it it's an outcome it's going to be
a great outcome or a bad outcome or an outcome I never know about but I'm not in the business
of evaluating outcomes I'm in the business of having new outcomes so if they say we hate it
never darken our door again I'll say okay that's the outcome
if I'm hooked on outcome this is another phrase we can think about people get hooked on outcome if
I'm hooked on outcome it's because I'm invested in the outcome leading to new outcomes like
if they love it maybe they'll hire me to write another one or maybe they'll tell their friends
and they'll hire me I think a function of being a senior citizen is that I'm no longer hooked
on outcomes at this point I got I'm playing with the house’s money and I think that makes it a lot
easier for me to have this tranquility and work on work on it as if I were working on any other
tool that I might wish to work with but that's why I'm writing this book of practice because
when I was young and freaked out I needed a book that said to me explicitly you're just young don't
freak out and that book didn't exist and so or at least I couldn't find my way to it so maybe
we can consider this to be the theme of the book of practice you're just young don't freak out
I think too you have enough sort of roller coaster rides and then you start to realize oh okay yeah
we're just kind of chugging up the thing here and who knows what's gonna happen but but I'm gonna
hold on and and I've been down this I've been on this ride before I've been on this ride all
along and I know it only has three states up down in plateau and I actually talk about this I think
in my book creativity rules I talk about something called plateau thinking which says you're only in
one of three states either your life is rising or it's descending or you're on a plateau and
wherever you are one thing's for sure you'll be someplace different you might go from rising to
plateau or plateau to rising again or plateau to falling or falling to plateau or falling to
rising but you're always in a change of state as long as you are engaged in your practice as long
as you're creating outcomes you're also creating change for yourself now that's really powerful if
you think about it all my outcomes even the worst ones create change within me if that change is
positive then it's growth so now I can look at bad outcomes and say even if it's a bad outcome and
doesn't advance my career it's not about outcome it's a good outcome because it advances my growth
that's a win I can always take no matter what the other guy says and again thinking about people who
might be watching this video and and wanting to engage effectively in their own creative practice
this is the secret there are no bad outcomes they're only outcomes that we assign a value to
and we have the choice to assign those outcomes the value of good outcome bad outcome or just
outcomes and where I try to stand every day of my life is it's not a good thing it's not
a bad thing it's just a thing that's taking place and if I can apprehend it on that level
then no matter what it is I can manage it more effectively and of those three states sort of the
roller coaster analogy so ascending descending or plateauing where do you find your most comfortable
having just been through a plateau or a valley I'm not sure how to look at it I would say that that I
am I'm more comfortable with a plateau state than I was before let me lay it out for you
through the end of the year I was engaged in intense labors and then I finished them and
suddenly everything dropped off I had nothing to do and I knew that I needed to take a break
and I knew that I also needed to start my next project the book of practice
let's not start re-engage with because it's been around for a while
and I went through a period of about two weeks where I was saying no to starting the work
and then one day I said yes to starting the work and I recognize that's very common for me when I
know I need to recharge my body tells me because it just won't let me work and that's what gets
me through those spaces more broadly because of how I'm wired when I feel myself in dissent
I say to myself well of the three possible States descent is my least favorite I don't want to be
going down I want to go up I want my life to rise when I feel myself in dissent again I try
to be mindful of what's going on and act in a way that will reverse the situation I can give you a
great example in 2016 my writing practice was broken it was busted I couldn't write anything
I couldn't sell anything I didn't feel good about my writing I felt like it's over I'm never going
to be creatively successful again clearly this is a free fall descent but it wasn't the first
time I've been through this before I know what it's like to lose my writing mojo and I knew
from past experience that the solution was to try something different that's how I've always gotten
out of the bind in the past but up to that point it was always try a different kind of writing
and this time I said it's more major than that I need a more major change I need to rethink
everything and I made the conscious decision to take up art knowing that I didn't know the first
thing about art had no history no practice of it no expectation of being good at it but I knew that
if I introduced myself to it it would give me new information that I could use to reinvigorate my
writing so much so that I ended up writing a book about the experience of being my first year in art
because the the big hurdle I hit was I've been a writer all my life I know how to solve problems
creatively but I haven't been a writer an artist for five minutes I don't know how to do anything
I'm so uptight what do I do I said I know I'll go for a white belt in art because the white belt's
the one they give you for just showing up I think whatever else I can do I can show up and then when
I heard myself say those words white belt in heart another part of my brain said that's a money idea
because it will give structure to the work that I'm going to do for the next year it will give me
the freedom to work without needing to harvest for a full year that is to say I give myself
permission to play for a year knowing that I'm going to take all that playfulness and
turn it into product at the end and it gave me a great book called a white belt in art.