NEW ORLEANS—To everyone who’s ever gotten what seems like a brainstorm, only to quickly flip and decide, “Nah, that’ll never fly,” Kyle Scheele hopes you’ll think twice. 

“Maybe your idea is too crazy to work. There certainly are ideas that are. But for every idea that’s too crazy to work there are a thousand more that never see the light of day because we self-censor, we self-sabotage, we talk ourselves out of it before we ever give our idea a shot,” said Scheele. 

He certainly knows what he’s talking about, considering Scheele is known as the “Patron Saint of Crazy Ideas.” In fact, “I believe in crazy ideas” is the first thing you see on Scheele’s website. He practices what he preaches, with a resume that includes building a 16 foot by 30 foot cardboard Viking ship, filling it with regrets from 21,000 people, and then torching the whole thing. 

Scheele came to Nacha’s Smarter Faster Payments 2025 for an April 28 keynote sponsored by Visa, where he encouraged attendees to not just come up with seemingly crazy ideas, but to nurture them and see what develops. 

“My policy is this: I write down every idea. If it’s good I write it down, but if it’s bad I write it down too, because sometimes a bad idea later will make me laugh. And that’s good. And sometimes right between two bad ideas is a pretty good one.”

Among Scheele’s pretty good ideas is sending a suitcase full of shirts he designed to Urban Outfitters to get the retailer to sell them. He also organized two fake marathons where people across the globe made it seem like they’d run the 26.2 miles. 

You might think you could never come up with something like that, but Scheele scoffs at the notion that only some people are creative. 

“That’s an insane thing to think,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a non-creative person. Every human being is creative.” 

Scheele also stressed that you don’t have to be Picasso with a brush or Baryshnikov on stage to be creative. Quite the contrary, he said, noting there’s plenty of room for creativity in everyday life—even in the office.

“We’ve walled off most of the things that we do, and we say, ‘Well, I’m not in this small camp over here, so I must not be creative,’” said Scheele. “And that’s a sad thing to do to yourself with the one life that you have on this planet.”

How does this factor into the workplace? Smoothly, because Scheele believes every idea needs a crew. No one, he said, not even the rich and famous, made it alone.

“The Beyonces, the Kanyes, the Elons, the Taylor Swifts—we look at these people who’ve had these amazing creative outputs and, well, how did one person do that? The answer is they didn’t,” said Scheele. “They were part of a group. They were part of a community of people. Sometimes that was formalized, sometimes it was informal, but they collaborated, they worked together, and they made each other’s work better.”

Beyonce, he noted, started with the group Destiny’s Child, and now as a solo act will credit multiple writers on a single song. “You know what we call that?” Scheele asked. “It’s called collaboration. It’s called teamwork.”