The line names the part nobody wants to hear. The ratio is terrible. Most people generating ten ideas expect three to be good. Pauling is saying the actual yield is closer to one in twenty, and that is if you are trained.

The block is not a creativity problem. It is a commitment problem. Throwing away your own work costs more than most people budget for. The deck you spent six hours on. The positioning angle that felt clever yesterday. The product feature you championed in three meetings. Discarding them is not editing. It is grief work.

So most teams stop generating early. They workshop the first plausible idea until it sounds defensible. They schedule follow-ups to "pressure-test" it, which means finding reasons it might work. By the third meeting the idea has accrued too much sunk cost to discard. That is when the bad idea gets built.

The pattern reverses if you front-load volume. Generate fifteen concepts in ninety minutes, name the two that survive contact with reality, kill the rest before they accumulate mass. The good ideas are not better because you thought harder. They are better because you gave yourself thirteen chances to be wrong cheaply.

So today: one hour, generate ten concepts for the thing you have been iterating in circles. Write them as single sentences. Pick two. Kill eight. You are not wasting time. You are buying the room to be wrong before it costs you a quarter.