Creativity as a matter of volume
The head of a network of humor sites had a simple account of where good ideas come from. It depends on each idea being cheap to try.
I’m always throwing out ideas, so it’s not creativity, it’s just volume.
Ben Huh bought a blog of cat pictures with funny captions in 2007, with backing from investors, and turned it into the Cheezburger Network. By 2010 the company ran dozens of sites, most of them built on the same pattern: readers submit a funny image, readers vote, the best ones get published. Some of those sites found large audiences. Others faded without much notice.
That history explains Huh’s description of his own talent. He is not claiming that each idea is brilliant. He is claiming that he produces so many that a few are bound to work, and that the skill lies in letting the market sort them. It is a modest account of creativity and a useful one, because volume can be learned in a way that genius cannot.
Treating ideas as volume changes how they are handled. They get written down quickly, shared early and judged by results instead of by how clever they sounded in a meeting. Nobody has much ego invested in one idea among dozens, so dropping a weak one costs little, and the person who suggested it is free to suggest the next.
The approach works when an idea is cheap to test. A new humor site on the Cheezburger platform needed a domain, a template and some early content. If readers ignored it, the loss was small, and the lesson fed the next attempt. The same logic applies to headlines, marketing emails, landing pages and small product features, where trying ten versions costs little more than trying one.
It works poorly when each attempt is expensive. A restaurant, a piece of hardware or a new drug cannot be launched fifty times to see which version catches on. In those fields, a founder has to think harder before committing, and volume belongs in cheap stages such as sketches, prototypes and conversations with customers. There is also a cost inside a company. A leader who throws out many ideas can exhaust a team that treats every one of them as an instruction.
The line is best read as a separation between generating ideas and committing to them. Generate freely, then commit to few.