SAN DIEGO—There aren’t a lot of people who would stand on stage and encourage those in the ballroom to “go off and be boldly stupid,” but that’s exactly what Scott Dikkers did. And he knows of what he speaks, because his lengthy resume in comedy includes being the founder of the satirical humor website The Onion.

While no one ever confused working in the Payments industry with, say, writing for Jimmy Kimmel, Dikkers believes in a certain brand of unorthodoxy that you probably never heard from your high school guidance counselor. 

“Come up with the stupidest idea you can; write a bad first draft; make a mistake. This is your permission slip, because this is how you’re going to get at the good stuff. Practice professional stupidity,” Dikkers said in his April 27 opening keynote at Smarter Faster Payments 2026. And he wasn’t kidding, because he shared his “principles of professional stupidity,” which starts with “quantity over quality.”

“I suggest to all the people that I coach to write 10 ideas before breakfast. If you compile 10 ideas every day, you can amass 300 ideas a month” which eventually becomes 3,650 ideas a year. “Most of those are going to be terrible and you’re going to throw them away. But oh, the gold nuggets that are left when you finally sift through them. Priceless.”

Dikkers followed that with “don’t try to be original—there’s no such thing as an original idea.” He insisted that “for 40 years now The Onion has just been rerunning the same headlines and just switching out the nouns.”

His third principle of professional stupidity is to not trust your first, second, or third idea. “It’s the people who go beyond that who are going to succeed,” he said, noting that most people would stop after three bad ideas. “But the ideas that come after that is where the gold is, because your brain is desperate for new ideas and it’s making new connections it would otherwise never make.”

Finally, Dikkers stressed “you’ve got to have fun with it, you’ve got to be silly. I mean, if you’re not enjoying your life, what are you doing here?”

Dikkers doesn’t just give his advice, he lives it. Along with The Onion he’s sold TV projects MTV and Comedy Central, writes the Substack “No Dikkering Around”—billed as “the no-nonsense daily jolt for the writer, performer, and raconteur who wants to get things done”—and his work has won a Peabody and the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

And while there are no guarantees in life, Dikkers encouraged the Payments audience to give his suggestions a try. 

“At some point, somebody might call you a genius,” Dikkers said, “but don’t let this go to your head, because tomorrow somebody’s just going to call you stupid again.”