"The Best Way to Have a Good Idea Is to Have a Lot of Ideas" — Linus Pauling on Why Quantity Sparks Innovation

A Twice-Nobel-Laureate's 'Law of Quantity'

Linus Pauling, one of the very few people to win two Nobel Prizes in entirely different fields — chemistry and peace — once said, 'The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. And throw away the bad ones.' At a glance the line sounds obvious, but it contains a truth that anticipated modern innovation research.

Most people start by demanding 'quality' from their ideas. The harder you grip the wish 'I must come up with one good idea,' the more your brain freezes and nothing comes. This is a natural response from the perspective of brain architecture. Brain science has shown that the prefrontal cortex, which evaluates ideas critically, and the temporal lobe networks, which generate ideas freely, cannot operate at full power simultaneously. Demanding quality first shuts down the circuits that produce quantity.

The order Pauling recommends — quantity first, then choose for quality — is exactly the two-stage process that creativity research calls 'divergent thinking' followed by 'convergent thinking.' Psychologist Robert Simonton has shown repeatedly that scientists and artists who left the greatest works behind also produced the most failed works. Picasso created roughly twenty thousand pieces in his lifetime; Edison filed 1,093 patents; Bach wrote hundreds of cantatas, churning out roughly one a week. The number of masterpieces was almost proportional to the number of duds.

What Edison's 3,500 Notebooks Tell Us About the Power of Quantity

Thomas Edison, the king of inventors, is best known for saying, 'Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.' Less well known is that he left over 3,500 lab notebooks containing tens of thousands of ideas and failures.

In perfecting the filament for the incandescent bulb, the official record alone shows that he tried more than 6,000 different materials. Bamboo, beard hair, thread, straw — he tested everything, and most burned out within seconds. The famous exchange where a reporter asked him, 'Don't you feel you have failed six thousand times?' and Edison replied, 'No, I have simply discovered six thousand ways that won't work,' is more than feel-good positivity.

It is the practical embodiment of Pauling's law of quantity. The divergent approach of testing every promising candidate was the only path that allowed the optimal answer to emerge. Edison left those terrifying stacks of notebooks because he was a scientist who could complete an entire 'divergence-and-convergence' cycle on his own.

Sony Co-founder Masaru Ibuka and the 'One in a Hundred' Mindset

Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka often told his researchers, 'Even one hit out of a hundred is enough. Don't fear the ninety-nine,' as Akio Morita recalled in his memoirs. Before arriving at the prototype that would become the Walkman, Ibuka himself tried dozens of audio technology ideas, most of which never reached commercialization.

Yet Ibuka did not view the ninety-nine misses as 'waste.' In his words, 'The ninety-nine failures build the targeting that lets the hundredth one land.' The accumulation of failures gives an embodied understanding of real-world constraints, market needs, and technical limits — and the single success rests on top of that understanding. This is precisely the structure Pauling described: quantity is what makes quality recognizable.

The innovations that made Sony famous worldwide — the transistor radio, the Walkman, the CCD camera — were each only a small slice of an enormous internal pool of ideas. What Ibuka really built was a culture in which producing a large quantity of ideas was not embarrassing. That culture, more than any single product, became the largest legacy of postwar Japanese manufacturing.

A Quiet Realization After Writing Twenty Ideas on a Café Napkin

A personal aside. There was a stretch when the direction of a new project would not come together. I would sit at my desk for hours, and the more I thought, the louder a voice in my head said, 'Not that, not that either,' until I closed my laptop on a blank page. Anyone who has tried to create has had those days.

One weekend, I walked into a café nearby with nothing but a paper notebook, ordered a coffee, and made one rule: 'Write down twenty project ideas, no matter how stupid they sound.' The first three or four were earnest. By the fifth, they were obviously off. After ten, half of them felt like jokes. By the fifteenth I no longer knew what I was writing — and I kept the pen moving.

When I finished and took a sip of coffee, something odd happened. The twelfth idea — the one I had written assuming I'd throw it away — suddenly looked different. 'Wait. With a small twist, this could actually be the main proposal.' That idea, in modified form, ended up being adopted later. In that café moment, scribbling all the way down to the corner of the napkin, Pauling's words became real to me for the first time. Without producing the quantity, you cannot see the real treasure inside yourself.

Five Practical Ways to Increase Your Idea Volume

Increasing the quantity of ideas is a matter of system, not talent. Try these five strategies.

First, force divergence with a timer. Set a ten-minute timer for one theme, and require yourself to write down at least twenty ideas in that span. Do not judge quality at all. Shorter than ten minutes feels rushed, longer than ten gets diluted. Ten minutes of constraint suppresses the evaluation mode and activates the generation mode.

Second, postpone the quality filter. When the voice 'this won't work' or 'this isn't realistic' shows up while you are writing, write that comment in the margin of the page. Don't pretend the evaluation isn't there — give it a parking spot. By giving criticism a place to wait, you protect the generative mode.

Third, set a minimum quota. Edward de Bono, a leader in lateral thinking, recommends 'always produce at least thirty before narrowing down.' The number thirty crosses the threshold past the obvious first ten and lets the deeper ideas in your mind start to surface.

Fourth, generate with others. There is a limit to the volume one person can produce alone. Formats like a 'brainstorming card game' with three to five people on a single theme use each other's ideas as associative triggers and produce a quantity unreachable solo. Psychologist Keith Sawyer's research shows that hybrid formats — group divergence followed by individual deepening — generate the most innovative outputs.

Fifth, periodically reread the ideas you've banked. The true value of a written idea often appears not at the moment of writing but weeks later when you reread it with a cool head. Ideas that seemed silly at the time can suddenly shine when combined with a new context. An idea notebook is an investment in your future self.

A Culture That Doesn't Fear Bad Ideas Changes Organizations

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, in his book Creativity, Inc., describes the most important culture Pixar protected as 'guarding the early stage of an idea.' Newborn ideas are, almost without exception, immature and full of flaws. Criticizing them too early eventually trains the organization so that no one offers ideas at all.

Catmull openly states, 'Every Pixar script starts as a complete mess.' What matters is not letting the mess remain a mess but having a culture that gradually polishes from the mess. This is the organizational version of Pauling's 'just throw away the bad ones.' Because they are produced on the assumption that most will be discarded, quantity flows. Because quantity flows, you reach the polished one.

In Japan, Toyota's kaizen culture runs on the same principle. Frontline workers submit millions of improvement suggestions a year, and most are not adopted. Yet the one percent that are can change the global automotive industry. Whether an organization can hold a culture of producing without fear is what determines its long-term innovation capacity.

Quantity Calls Forth Quality — But Not 'Irresponsible Quantity'

There is a common misunderstanding to clear up. The 'lots of ideas' that Pauling recommends is not a stream of off-the-cuff guesses. Pauling himself possessed a vast knowledge of chemistry, physics, and medicine, which is why most of his many ideas had real intellectual grounding. Edison and Ibuka likewise had unmatched depth of knowledge in their respective fields, which is why their volume was 'prepared volume,' not careless volume.

In other words, the soil that grows volume is daily learning and observation. If you want to produce many good ideas, learn a great deal first and observe a great deal first. Then write divergently — and only then does the volume become meaningful. It is like cooking. With nothing in the fridge, the more plates you set out, the more empty plates you have. Ingredients are what create the countless combinations.

A First Step Toward the 'Quantity Habit' You Can Take Today

What Linus Pauling's words remind us of is that creativity is not the property of geniuses but a capacity available to anyone willing to stop fearing volume. Starting today, set aside one notebook. The theme can be anything: a problem at work, a struggle at home, how to spend the weekend. Whatever the theme, begin by writing twenty or more ideas.

Nothing will come at first. Around the tenth, your hand will stop. Keep going. Write down the absurd ones, the impossible ones. Past the fifteenth mark, ideas that surprise even you start showing up. Those are the real ideas that have been sleeping in the back of your brain.

Between the person who tries to land one good idea on the first swing and the person who produces volume and chooses, the long-term gap is large — and the latter wins. The journey of your creativity begins with twenty ideas in today's notebook.