To be creative, you must be prepared to be wrong. To make great things, you must be prepared to fail. Creativity requires the willingness to think the unthinkable, to articulate the untested, to experiment with the unknown. And you will often be wrong. Making stuff is mostly a trial error affair. In fact, error and failure feed creativity. As the saying goes “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment”.
Why then, are we so afraid to fail? Why is being wrong an embarrassing experience that we try to avoid at all costs? (even at the cost of denial, a behavior commonly mistaken for ideology) I believe it’s because we have a biased, distorted view of the ratio between good and bad ideas. Nobody remembers the bad ideas. It’s the good ideas that survive, spread and make a mark in the world. So we get the false impression that creative or successful people just have better ideas. Odds are, that they just have more of them, along with the courage to share them, the determination to try them and the wisdom to learn from and abandon the bad ones.
We just don’t see the silent evidence, the graveyard of ideas. Thus we fail to appreciate the value of being wrong. This gives us the illusion that creativity is a talent, the ability to somehow come up with better ideas. But creativity is a process. It’s the ability to consider a large number of ideas without prejudice, as well as to quickly kill the bad ones without empathy.
Sadly, our social norms, especially those prevalent in many business environments, are stifling or preventing this process. Bad ideas carry a stigma, we place a premium at avoiding risk, we make no allowance for failure, and this makes us think defensively. We train ourselves out of our ability to be playful and challenge what we know or believe to be true. The emphasis is on “training out of”, since we seem to be born with this ability, as anyone who has spent a day with a 5-year-old can confirm.
The same aversion to admitting failure often leads to the other extreme of the problem: getting emotionally committed to an idea, refusing to see evidence that it’s wrong and ultimately wasting time on a futile direction. When you’re used to articulating and trying 10 things every week, you’re also comfortable with dismissing 9 of them. You’re trained at admitting failure. When you only articulate an idea if you’re comfortably convinced it’s safe, you’re not prepared to truly judge it or dismiss it, it’s too precious and there’s too much prejudice about it. Not only you miss out on the wisdom of the many possible ways to fail, you also get emotionally biased to prove that you were not wrong – an intellectual dead-end.
On the other hand, creativity cannot be brute-forced. You can’t just try out any crazy thing that comes up, simply because nobody has the resources to. So, I’m not advocating a blind, anything-goes approach at creative thinking. Equally important to the ability to come up with ideas (even bad ones), is the ability to quickly and dispassionately shoot them down (particularly the bad ones). There is no good recipe for this. This is where insight and good judgment are tested. But test them, you must. They need the exercise.
I think one of the great things about America is that we have the freedom to try out ideas and fail here. It wouldn’t fly in other countries, but we have the greatest entrepreneurial spirit in the world. Even crazy ideas, like the Vegas stripper who came up with http://dirtyphonebook.com that would never even be legal in other countries works here. But for every good idea there are a ton of failures. I think that it’s just like dating. You’re going to ask out a bunch of women and only a percentage might say yes. But the successes are grand. The analogy might be poor, but where we go with risks defines us as a people.
I think our aversion for failure has been quite wrongly attributed to selfishness, denial and prejudice based on social norms. People don’t want to fail because they are realistic: it’s very possible that if they venture on a business/idea/project in an all-in/methodical/proper way the result will be most likely something they will not be able to drag themselves out of. I am talking prolonged un/mis-employment, bad financial situation or worse. And the stakes are higher the more you leave behind the student stage and the more risky/playful you are with testing new ideas.
It’ll be a very interesting future ahead esp. for countries like Greece which will have to rely on the make or break of such ventures to survive. More to the point, the years ahead will be very interesting for us who will actually bear the full force of the consequences of our ventures – for better or for worse.
Having said that, I agree of course it’s the only way ahead.
Dear friend,
as you now better than me, there is no single company, let’s say in Greece were we tend to live and work(probably won’t hold true for me in a few days) the fact remains that the
private sector, aka companies, hesitate to perform the operation mentioned above. If someone
starts something and he discovers that the rood ahead ends up in dead end and must change, companies don’t offer that amount of time to make that switch. So you are considered a failure, despite the fact that u have learned,gained so much knowledge.
You could not be more spot on. My thinking exactly. Could not agree more with the comments. Please look into a book titled ‘ideas from the graveyard’ by connecting on http://www.inyoureyespublishers.com and you will be amazed how your thinking resonates with the author from Africa and how anyone could yank himself out of any gloomy financial state. I say the people in Greece are perfectly placed for greater things. You are already deflated and can only be inflated. Get this book from an African perspective!