Too much of a good idea
I really like it when people say that someone had a good idea, but then took the good idea “too far.” It strikes me as absurd, although there are obviously cases where too much of a good idea finally turned it bad.
I asked Joe for an example. He cited us illegally putting up a billboard for our musical Who is Jim Holt? before it performed in Austin.
One night we found a blank billboard canvas, untied it from the billboard structure, flattened it on the roof of Jack Brown Cleaners, painted “Who is Jim Holt?” on it, and then retied it to the structure.
“That was a great idea for one billboard,” Joe said, “But it would have been bad to do that to every billboard in the city.”
As psychologists like to say, “The extreme of anything turns that thing into its opposite.”
I was talking about this good idea going too far cliche to someone once, and he said, “Oh, yeah, like when people say, ‘Hitler had a good idea. He just took it too far.’”
That cracked me up, because obviously, Hitler had a horrific idea that he took too far. It was so thoroughly bad - without even a seed of goodness - that it stayed bad even as it went to the furthest possible extreme. It never did become its opposite, did it?
Does this mean that good ideas that become bad when taken too far always had a seed of badness from the beginning? And that seed of badness got stretched out until it enveloped the entire thing? And that the only truly good ideas are ideas that could never be taken too far?
If so, I hope that all of my ideas here on Idea Province pass the going-too-far test.
Hmm. Even just looking at the entry right before this one… if everyone named their kids “Guy,” and then eventually everyone in the world was named Guy, that would be going too far, wouldn’t it?
Damn. I’ve failed.
5 years ago