inspiration in strange places
One of the things I’m doing this week at the office is reading and evaluating all sorts of documents I can’t talk about because of the many non-disclosure agreements I signed saying I wouldn’t. And I won’t, but I did find a single sentence buried in a disused paragraph somewhere in that stack of hundreds of pages that struck me as profound:
Make interesting new mistakes.
That’s a pretty good philosophy, when it comes right down to it. We’re human. We make mistakes all the time, but we learn from them, often just enough to set us on the path to make completely different mistakes. That’s the goal – keep learning and trying new things; a pretty good signal you’re making that ethos work is that you find yourself trying different things and screwing them up in intriguing new ways.
If you’re repeating the same mistakes over and over, you’re not making any progress…but if you fail brilliantly in a completely novel manner each time you stumble, you’re building up valuable experience, which is kind of the point.
It turns out, of course, that this bit of wisdom isn’t entirely new. In fact, I mentioned a variant of the idea in this very space a few years back. At that time, I was making mention of Neil Gaiman’s Keynote address at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2012, which closed with the following:
And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.
Closing with Neil Gaiman never hurts. That guy can shape some words. So, to paraphrase, go screw up in some interesting new ways – it’s good for you.
