Boing Boing

Boing Boing

Your willingness to look stupid determines the quality of your creative output

Ellsworth Toohey
Mar 13, 2026
∙ Paid

Jellyfish (MadebyCan/shutterstock.com)

Sharif Shameem’s friend Aadil was standing in a Whole Foods trying to write something clever on a birthday cake. Nothing came. So Aadil proposed a method: “Let’s just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones.” It worked — they landed on a pun they’d never have reached by aiming for clever fro…

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