I’m tired of hearing people talk about “quantity vs. quality,” as if the two were mutually exclusive. [You: “Really? You’re tired of that? You’re hearing this conversation so much that you’re actually tired of it? What kind of lame parties are you going to, man? I never hear people talking about ‘quantity vs. quality!'”] Well, perhaps I hang out with a more erudite crowd than you. But the point is this: quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, when it comes to creativity, quantity leads to quality.

When I was producing the sketch comedy TV show Almost Live!, we had a regular segment called The Late Report, which was a fake newscast (like the Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live). Every week, each of ten writers wrote at least twenty jokes apiece for this segment. That’s upwards of 200 jokes—out of which we chose eight.

Eight out of 200.

Now, I’m no math whiz, but that’s fewer than half!

The point is that the key to generating creative ideas is to generate lots of ideas! In the arts as well as in business, the most successful innovators tend to produce an incredible number of ideas—most of which don’t make the final cut. Linus Pauling (who won Nobels in both chemistry and peace, so there!) said, “The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

A compelling case for this is made by Frans Johansson in his wonderful book, The Medici Effect. He points out, for example:

• the best way to see who has written groundbreaking scientific papers is to look at who has published the most scientific papers
• the best predictor for having a grant proposal approved is the total number of grant proposals written
• classical composers tend to produce most of their masterpieces during the same period when they produced most of their failures

In each case, quality was a product of quantity.

Paul McCartney estimates that he and John Lennon wrote upwards of 100 songs before they came up with their first good one. Thankfully, they didn’t give up at number 99.

In the case of Almost Live!, 192 out of 200 jokes were discarded. Now, some people (the glass-half-empty people) might look at that and say, “That’s a 96% failure ratio. If you guys had real jobs, you’d be fired!” The tragedy is that, in many cases, these people would be right. That’s because in business, we tend to punish failure. And that’s where we get it wrong.

See, those 192 jokes that didn’t make it were not failures. They were necessary steps toward the eventual success: the eight jokes that made it onto the air. We all know about Edison and his search for a successful light bulb filament. To some, he failed some thousand (or ten thousand, depending on whose story you read) times. Edison’s take, though, was “No, I’ve simply discovered a thousand (or ten thousand) things that don’t work.” I wonder how quickly some corporate boss would have fired him.

So what do I want you to do with this concept? Well, the next time you’re looking for an idea—for your team, for your business, for your relationship—I want you to generate lots of ideas! Don’t stop at one or two. Come up with twenty. And if twenty come to you easily, then come up with 200. Because you never know—if you stop too soon, the brilliant one, the one that would have made you rich and famous, might have been the next one.