Billy Joel’s Beast and the Case for Terrible Ideas

Billy Joel has sold more than 160,000,000 albums, and he has had exactly three number one hits. Even so, he sells out stadiums. The songs fans sing the loudest are often not the hits at all but the slow burners, tracks like “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” that you would never hear on the radio. By any standard he is one of the most successful recording artists in history. He is also notorious for putting off the one thing that made him one: writing songs.

It is so difficult for him that he once described the piano to Howard Stern this way: “sometimes I look at the piano and it’s this big black beast with 88 teeth that wants to bite my fingers off.” For Joel, a song did not arrive in a sudden, euphoric burst of creativity. It came slowly and painfully, more like carving marble. The results are brilliant. The process is a grind.

I find that oddly comforting. If a man with that catalog still sits down braced for a bite, then the dread you feel at your own blank page is not proof that you are doing it wrong. Some days, if you want to make work that lasts, you will have to carve marble. I won’t pretend otherwise. Creativity is work, and there is no version of it that skips the work.

But there is a difference between work that is hard and work that is harder than it needs to be. That difference is the subject of this piece. Most of the time we make idea generation harder by asking every idea to be good, workable, and publishable the moment it shows up. Practicality has its place in the creative process. When it arrives too early, though, it shuts the door on everything interesting. You cannot remove the beast. You can change what you ask of yourself before you sit down in front of it.

The tape is rollingA summer with no one listening.

Start with a cafeteria. Richard Feynman, who would share the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965, was sitting in the Cornell cafeteria one day watching someone throw plates in the air. As a plate went up, it wobbled, and he noticed that the Cornell medallion on the plate was rotating faster than the plate itself. He got curious. Just for fun, he decided to work out the equations of the wobble. A colleague came over and asked what on earth he was doing that for. Feynman’s answer was, “No reason at all. I’m just curious.”

That play led him to ask questions about how electron orbits wobble in relativity, and those questions led to the work that eventually won him the prize. Ozan Varol, the author of Awaken Your Genius, tells the story, and he notes that Feynman himself said there would have been no Nobel Prize if he hadn’t sat down, just for fun, to work out the equations of those wobbling plates.

Look at what that answer protects. “No reason at all” means no deliverable, and no deliverable means no standard to meet. Play has no standard, and that is exactly why it is so productive.

A few years later, about 150 miles east of Cornell, a group of friends ran a similar experiment without knowing it. In 1967, Bob Dylan was in Woodstock, New York, recovering from a motorcycle accident. Up the road, his longtime bandmates, the group known simply as the Band, rented a modest pink house called Big Pink. Garth Hudson, the only formally trained musician of the bunch, was also technically savvy, and he assembled an in-home recording setup at a time when almost nobody did that.

If you wanted to record in those days, you booked studio time. Studio time meant union rules, and union rules meant a running meter, rigid hours, and mandatory breaks, no matter when inspiration struck. The basement at Big Pink meant freedom. Dylan caught wind of the setup and joined in. They tried new styles, wrote sentimental songs and silly songs, and experimented with everything in between. Sometimes Dylan would clank out lyrics on a typewriter, pull the page, and carry it straight down to the basement, where they would work up an arrangement. More than a hundred songs came out of that summer, and all of it was caught on tape.

Those recordings became known as the basement tapes, and they were wildly influential. At a time when rock and roll was on a runaway train toward psychedelia, they opened a new avenue: roots rock, the genre we now call Americana.

You might guess the secret was time. They certainly had plenty of it. But more time is hardly a guarantee that ideas will flow, and it is often the opposite. The real difference was that they were recording with no intent to publish. The tape was rolling, but nobody planned to release the songs. They freed themselves from any responsibility for the success or failure of any track. There were no label executives looking over their shoulders asking, where’s the hits?

Feynman had a cafeteria. The Band had a basement. Both had permission to be irresponsible, and both produced work that outlasted the people who made it.

The inner finance departmentWe kill ideas before they breathe.

I see this almost every time I teach a team to generate ideas. We start with a prototype problem that everyone knows, and I usually use the same one: how can we make commercial air travel fun? It is a pain point we have all felt, so people loosen up. I give them a method that forces them to think in random ways about the problem, and they come back with remarkable ideas. What if the floor were an LED screen, with cameras on the bottom so you could see what is underneath the airplane? What if the plane were invisible, so you were flying Wonder Woman’s invisible jet? What if there were adult only flights with an open bar at the back, especially on the long hauls?

Then I say, great, now let’s use the same technique on a specific problem your managers gave me. And immediately, at every table in the room, I start hearing it. Well, finance would never go for that. That’s not really practical. That sort of violates one of our government regulations. We begin shutting down ideas before we are even willing to entertain them, because we carry so many filters in our heads about what is and isn’t possible.

None of those filters is stupid. Finance matters. Regulations are real. The mistake is one of timing. When the practical objection arrives before the idea has had a chance to become anything, you never find out what the idea could have been. As I put it to those teams, we can always rein an idea back and find a more practical version of it. But it is really hard to go from the most practical idea in the world to something that is actually unique and valuable.

So here is the first thing to try. Next time you catch yourself saying, man, this is really hard, try infusing some irresponsibility into the process. Play with ideas you never intend to publish. If you cannot bring yourself to do that alone, borrow someone else’s nerve. Ask a trusted collaborator to help jumpstart your imagination, and be clear about the kind of conversation you need. No self editing, no filters. Free them from any obligation to execute on the final concept. The more outrageous, the better.

The biologyYour brain is built for the middle.

There is a second reason the early filters are so stubborn, and it has nothing to do with finance. It is biology. Your mind is a complex neural network. When you have an experience or an insight, a connection forms between neurons. The more often you repeat that experience, or collect the reward of an aha, the more that connection is reinforced. Your brain works this way because it is designed to help you predict the future and keep you safe. Its novelty function exists to say, something is out of sorts here, pay attention, because that could be a saber toothed tiger hiding in the bushes.

That leaves creative people with a strange problem. Our minds are almost our worst enemy when it comes to novelty, and yet the value we create is founded on novelty. It is founded on our ability to meet the needs of the marketplace in a way nobody else does. Our ambitions fight our biology. So we compromise, and the compromise follows a pattern you will recognize the moment you see it.

I won’t claim this explains what Billy Joel sees in a piano. But I suspect it explains something about your blank page. If we are going to reach our ambitions, we have to overcome our wiring, and that takes tools that force the brain out of the familiar and into the novel. One of the best I know comes from a man who asks people for terrible ideas on purpose.

A lower targetAim for terrible.

Troy Hitch is an agency veteran, funny, talented, and insanely imaginative. When the pandemic hit, he found himself locked in a loft in his apartment, and he decided to try doing his thinking in real time. He opened a Twitch account and began streaming under the name Imagivate. The idea was simple: let’s get together and come up with terrible ideas.

He is careful about that word. He does not mean bad ideas. He means terrible ones, ideas that make people cringe, ideas so outlandish they seem insane. Every morning from 8:30 to 9:00, the chat would fill up, Troy would give a prompt, and people would fire away. One prompt was how to solve the problem of the really long line at Chick-fil-A. One answer was to build a smaller Chick-fil-A in the parking lot of the Chick-fil-A, so that you could get some Chick-fil-A while you wait to get your Chick-fil-A.

That is a genuinely terrible idea, and it is also a doorway. Troy says the terrible ideas almost inevitably lead to amazing breakthrough ideas. The group would riff on them and push until, as he puts it, terrible becomes terrific. They often got there. And more than once, people ended a session staring at an idea that had defied every effort to make it terrible.

Troy has a story that shows why this works. About ten years ago he built a presentation about getting to creative ideas, and he spun a tale about a fictitious company called Teleportly, a travel disruptor offering what it called perceived teleportation. Travelers would be given experimental pharmaceuticals, sealed in a hermetically sealed containment system called the funcophagus, shipped like cargo on a modified Airbus 380, and revived at their destination, believing no time had passed. He delivered it completely straight, and people wondered whether it was real.

Then he paid it off. If someone had told you ten years earlier that you would stand on a street corner, press a button on your phone, and watch somebody’s Honda Civic pull up, that you would climb into the back seat, say nothing to the driver, get out at your destination without paying, and go on your merry way, you would have said, you’re crazy, I would never do that. You might say the same thing about Teleportly now.

Great ideas come from terrible ideas.

Troy describes his method as getting to the right solution the wrong way, and he says there is something “disarming and relieving” about it. I don’t have to come up with the answer. I only have to come up with an answer. And the more different that answer is, the better. When a company tries to solve a new problem with the same conventions of brand and product it has always used, he says, it is just going to struggle.

Notice what this does to the beast. A target of brilliant makes every attempt a possible failure. A target of terrible makes every attempt a success. The stakes drop, the filters stand down, and the ideas begin to move.

This weekGive the beast less to bite.

So far we have three tools, and none of them is complicated. The first is irresponsibility: work on something you never intend to publish, and keep the tape rolling. The second is a collaborator you have given permission to be impractical. The third is a terrible idea session, where you ask for the worst possible answers to a real problem and then see which ones refuse to stay terrible. If you try only one thing this week, pick one of those and protect twenty or thirty minutes for it.

If none of them gets the juices flowing, there is a fourth tool, and you only need a sheet of paper. I call it the personal idea pad. You start by writing the problem at the center of the page. Then you gather four kinds of starter words, one of each.

Now take one starter word and let it run. Say the word is apple. Apple makes me think of computers, computers make you think of chips, chips make me think of dip, dip makes you think of tobacco, then cigarettes, then smoke, then fire truck, then alarm, then sleep. It is a giant mind map of free associated words, and it is especially fun in a group. Do the same with each of the other starter words until you have a sheet full of them.

Then comes the part that feels silly. Randomly choose two words from the page and smash them together. Cigarette and alarm. How could those two words help us solve the problem in front of us? Maybe the answer is no. Great. Choose two more. You are not hunting for a good idea. You are forcing connections your brain would never have offered on its own, and watching for any spark.

When you are stuck, don’t just sit there staring at the problem. Don’t ask what you did last time, what the client expects, or what is in the brief. Randomize your thinking, explore what is already in your head, and force some of those connections. It is hard work, and it tends to get harder the longer you do it. The myth we love to believe is that some people just have it and some people just don’t. That is not true. Any of us can get there if we are willing to do the work.

Billy Joel still looks at the piano and sees 88 teeth. I can’t tell you why his slow burners hit the way they do, or why fans love the songs that never topped a chart. Maybe the grind has something to do with it. What I can tell you is that the beast never goes away, and that nobody gets the work out of it by trying to impress it. The Band didn’t beat the beast in that basement. They simply stopped asking it to make a hit. They hit record, and they played.

The beast will always have its 88 teeth. Sit down anyway, and press record like no one is listening.