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Fifty Headlines

By Peter Lloyd

Quantity is the big brother of creativity. We can argue about the mother—whether she be necessity, inadequacy, laziness, or some other mother. But Quantity definitely belongs in the family. And a hard-working, get-the-job-done brother he is. Quantity doesn’t always please with his presence, but wade through his garbage, and you’ll always find gold.

You can also think of Quantity as the brute-force creativity tool. A tool that demands perseverance from the user. A quantity of steps gets you where you’re going. Climbing a mountain seems like a hopelessly eternal chore when you’re standing at the bottom. But eventually, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, over and over... before you know it, the breathtaking vista from the summit is yours.

I love crossword puzzles, but I avoided math puzzles for the longest time, because I understand words much better than numbers. Yet lately I’ve been doing ken ken puzzles. After conquering the 5-by-5 size, and inspired by the book Sudoku 1-2-3-4 by Marvin Rowe, I had to move on to 7-by-7s. The mountain analogy applied. Yes, they were difficult at first, but a quantity of attempts improved my ability and quieted my fears. Thanks to Big Brother Quantity.

As an advertising copywriter, I often found myself in search of headlines. I never failed to find several stellar candidates and a few winners every time I forced myself to write fifty headlines. I took the discipline seriously. Even if I wrote several serviceable headlines in the first ten or twenty, I always forced myself to write fifty. Creative breakthroughs normally appeared in the twenties and thirties, but I always kept going. Invariably I would break into a whole new creative area in the forties and often changed the direction of the ad for the better before I hit fifty.

Now when someone asks me for a headline or a slogan, with years of fifty-at-a-time practice, I have very little trouble coming up with something engaging. It’s particularly easy to improve mediocre headlines. Thanks again to years of Quantity. Even if I could have come up with wonderful headlines while staring at the ceiling all those years as a copywriter, I would have passed up so much headline-writing practice.

posterIf there’s a downside to my headline exercise, it’s that lazy headlines drive me crazy. Like the promotional theme for a program at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. When I read, “Courage: The Vision to End Segregation, The Guts to Fight For It,” I gasped, then cringed. What a blemish on an otherwise noble effort!

Yes, I realize that the Freedom Center would never promote fighting for segregation, but that’s what the headline says. If the copywriter had sat down and scratched out ten or even twenty variations, no unintended meaning would have tarnished the result.

When the father of brainstorming, Alex Osborn, advised, “Seek quantity rather than quality of ideas,” he knew from experience that more is more on the way to breakthrough solutions. You want Quality? Going for Quality sometimes gets you there. Going for Quantity always gets you there.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen R. Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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