The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense. — Pablo Picasso

The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.

Author: Pablo Picasso

Insight: We're taught to think clearly, stay practical, avoid wasting time on wild ideas. Good sense tells us to color inside the lines, follow the proven path, and question anything that sounds too weird to work. But here's the thing—every genuinely interesting idea started as something that made no sense to practical people. When Picasso started painting faces from multiple angles at once, or when someone first suggested we could carry the internet in our pocket, "good" sense would have shut those thoughts down immediately. The real trap isn't that good sense is bad. It's that most of us let it do all the thinking. We use it like a security guard that keeps out not just bad ideas, but unusual ones too. That initial spark of creativity—the one that says "what if we tried this differently?"—gets vetted against reasonableness before it even gets off the ground. We've learned to kill ideas quietly, in our heads, before they're even strange enough to be interesting. The invitation here isn't to abandon logic entirely. It's to notice when you're being "sensible" about something not because it won't work, but because it's different from how things are usually done. That feeling of something being impractical or foolish? Sometimes that's exactly where something worth making lives.