My ideas suck, and probably yours too. At least that's the impression I have. It has nothing to do with me, or with you, it's simply the nature of how ideas come by. Growing up we are encouraged to believe that our ideas are brilliant and everything that comes out of your little brain is fantastic. Or at least that was the experience I had as a child. This was great encouragement at the time and it gave me the confidence to do things probably I would not have done otherwise. For which I am grateful. However, something I did not learn until I was older was that this is simply not true. Ideas on their own are not good, nor are they bad. They simply are.
Some people call them a seed that needs nurturing and care to fully develop. I partially disagree with this. A seed has a destiny encoded in it, the oak is already in the acorn. I don't think ideas work that way. I like to think of them as a colony of living microorganisms, entities that reproduce and mutate as they interact with their environment. Each generation carries new traits, some good, some bad. The idea you end up with is not the one you started with. Our job is not to protect the original, it's to create the conditions that push the colony in a direction worth going.
This opinion came to me from the study of genetic algorithms in computer science. In such methods you start with an initial "solution" and you insert random alterations to such solution until it starts to converge into the right one. For example, you can recreate a complete work of art by introducing 1000 randomly positioned, dimensioned and colored triangles. Then introduce small random changes into the triangles until they converge into the image you expect via some weighted evaluation method. This is how I see ideas now. They start as a cumulation of random data points, which I need to iterate and modify until they start forming something clearer and more tangible. In a design practice, the weighted evaluation is taste, style and voice: your accumulated sense of what is right, applied at every iteration to decide which mutations survive and which get discarded. In that sense, the work on the idea becomes much more relevant than the idea in the first place.
This is now how I approach my work and design practice. I take an idea and I mutate it, morph it, iterate it, until something different is formed. This means that less and less I execute the first idea that comes to my mind, I have learned that simply by probability it will never be right. As much as this impacts my ego, raw ideas are usually not great but great can come from raw ideas. I try to implement this more and more in my practice, to sit on a new design or new product and play with it until it matures. This took work and for me it does not come naturally. The urge to have something done sometimes takes over and I end up creating something from first draft. These items tend to age badly.
Obviously, I have to start somewhere. So whenever I have an idea I create a first draft, then iterate on the draft and continue iterating. The question is never whether the first idea is good. It almost certainly isn't. The question is whether you're willing to mutate it enough times to find out what it wanted to become.