Excerpt from “Selling the Invisible” by Harry Beckwith

At Carmichael-Lynch Advertising in the late 1980s, we conceived several awards for our group’s creative people. My favorite was the Crab Plaque.

This Plaque, awarded for the Stupidest Idea, featured a windup plastic crab, because crabs move laterally, symbolizing the power of lateral thinking. Because lateral ideas do not follow in a straight line from the thinking that preceded them, they usually look stupid at first.

But we need more stupid thinking. We had too much smart thinking; our average Stanford-Binet exceeded 120, easy. We just needed to be stupider – and to be unafraid of coming up with seemingly stupid ideas, which often turn out the best.

As we learned every day, highly intelligent people are the world’s foremost experts at squashing good ideas. That’s because intelligent people have one absolute favorite use fo their formidable intelligence: telling other people, with total conviction and logic, why other people’s ideas will not work.

Planning tends to attract these people, but they are dangerous. As smart as they are, their memories fail them; they always forget that good ideas often sound ludicrous at first.

Think dumb.