MISTAKES + MUTATIONS
EPISODE 032: MISTAKES + MUTATIONS
Our creative lives are full of mistakes and missteps, but what if we embraced those rather than fearing them, looking to them as possibilities and relying on them as mutations that drive the evolution of our work. What if we saw them with less fear? Would we stop playing it safe and do better work? Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
It is no well-kept secret among my friends, or for that matter anyone that’s read my blog over the last dozen years that I’ve made my share of mistakes. For the most part I’ve been pretty open about them, having said many times over the years, with apologies to Niezsche, that that which doesn’t kill us only gives us something to blog about. And if you listened to the last episode you’ll know I believe that our mistakes and missteps can be a deep source of raw materials for our art and the person we’re becoming.
So why are we so afraid of mistakes, why do we spend so much emotional energy worried about them, and looking for ways to sidestep them? I think there’s a way to look at mistakes that make them a little easier to swallow, and gives us greater freedom, but also to make better work because of them. I’m David duChemin, and this is episode 32 of A Beautiful Anarchy, Mistakes and Mutations. Let’s talk about it.
Intro/Music
OK, so let’s get this out of the way right at the start, no one goes looking to make mistakes. And I’m not going to spend the next 10 minutes encouraging you to do so. God knows, life is long enough that we’ll blunder our way into more than our share of them without even trying, and it’s already complicated enough without the need to go jumping into them willingly.
But I do think our fear of them can paralyze us and make us hedge our bets. It can make us blind to what’s right in front of us, and - perhaps worst of all - it can keep us thinking in terms of "this is good" and "this is bad.” We fear the so-called bad. We dismiss it too quickly, and that kind of binary thinking is a problem for creative people because life is never that simple and creative thinking in any discipline is not about good or bad but about possibility. Mistakes are full of possibilities.
There are a lot of reasons we fear making mistakes, not the least of which is the desire not to fall on our faces in front of others. But for most of us we want to do something, or make something and it's important enough to us that we’re prepared to spend time and money and a good deal of emotional energy on it and a mistake could completely derail those efforts, or so we think. We want to start at A and end up at Z quickly and without getting too much mud on our feet. We want the process to be painless and the product to be perfect.
Wouldn’t that be nice. Seen that way of course mistakes are bad and not making mistakes is good. Now, raise your hand if that’s the way it usually works for you.
Creative efforts of any kind don’t work that way, and neither does life. Anything we make, including we ourselves and the life we live, becomes what they become by way of an iterative or evolutionary process. It happens through mutation. In the natural world a mutation occurs and it either works in favour of a species or it doesn’t. If the mutation is beneficial to a species, those with that mutation pass it on. If it’s not, they get selected out. And over thousands of years, perhaps millions, a series of mistakes or mutations lead a species to be what it is. It’s not so much that the strongest survive, it’s that the most adaptive survive.
Creative efforts, are a series of reactions to mistakes and mutations. Look at all the things you ever made. Did they end up the way they started? Almost never. Did they all go perfectly to plan? I don’t think I’ve ever made anything, or done anything, perfectly on the first try. But I do know that trying to do so makes me terrified of doing the wrong thing, or having a so-called bad idea. Actually, that’s not true, there’s no stopping my bad ideas, but when I see them as bad, when I dismiss them as a mistake in my thinking without considering what possibility they might present me with, I stop the evolution of my work.
Here’s the problem with looking at ideas as merely good or bad. You have an idea on Friday night and it’s brilliant. There might have been a glass of wine involved, there might not, but this idea pops into your head and it’s brilliant. You write it down. But then on Monday morning you’re looking at your notes and you think, what in the world was I thinking? That’s a terrible idea. The paper goes into the bin and that’s that. One day the idea was good. The next day it was bad. In each instance your brain was pretty sure it had reasons for this assessment. Which one do you trust? Are you sure it’s as cut and dried as being either good or bad? Could the same idea not be both a mistake in your thinking but also contain some wild possibility? Why must it be one or the other?
Ideas aren’t often, on their own, good or bad. They’re just ideas and it’s not only what you do with them, but when you do it. And why. And what you combine them with. The question, I think, isn’t so much “is this idea good or bad?” it’s: “what possibilities does this idea represent?” Where could it lead? Sometimes the answer is nowhere. For now. It might not be a bad idea, but it might be incomplete. Write it down. Save it for the day when you find the other so-called bad idea that fits this one and combines to make an idea with much clearer possibilities.
I’m not saying there are no mistakes in our thinking, I’m saying there’s nothing to fear from them. It’s all raw materials. Mistakes are not failures; there is possibility in everything
The same is true of our actions. Now I’m talking here about the creative life, not a choice to get out of the LandRover and go pet the lions. Some mistakes are less rife with the possibility of good results. But when we stand at the brink of some new creative thing, and we fear making a mistake, I wonder if it's not the mistake we really fear, but the many possible results of that mistake. We don’t fear screwing up as much as we fear others seeing us screw up. We fear the cost. The extra time. We fear that if we screw up it’ll prove the voices in our head correct: we really can’t do this. What then? What if this eats up a year of my life? What if this just shows the world what I worried all along was true, that I’m just faking it?
What if, what if, what if? The mistakes are neutral ground. It’s the reaction to the mistakes we should be focused on. The mistakes are the mutations that give us new raw materials, new problems to solve, new forced detours that, in their turn, present us with new possibilities. They refine the thing we’re making. They force that refinement. And in doing so they refine us. They hone our skills, diminish our blind spots, and the more of them we experience the less afraid we are, not of the mistake, but that we’re not capable of making something great from that new lesson learned, that missed opportunity, or that unexpected detour. If we’re open to them, mistakes will give us greater clarity about the ideas we were so sure were either good or bad. They will suggest needed changes and new directions.
Sometimes I wonder if what we really need to ask ourselves is what we really want. Do we want to make what we make, to allow that it might become something better than we imagined, that it might be better than the limits of our abilities and our vision right here and now? Or do we want it merely to be done, just another box we tick before moving on to the next thing? Easy things accomplished easily. One desire demands that we risk going the hard route, that we navigate without a map, that we do a few U-turns, change a few tires, and maybe get there - wherever there is - a few days late. The other demands very little. But one route is more scenic, it changes us, and I don’t think the destination is the same. We inevitably end up in different places. For the ones who refuse to risk the detours, we basically end up in the same places every time.
Look, the mistakes are going to happen no matter what, to the reckless and the over-cautious, as well as to those in the middle. You’re not the only one freaking out that it could all go off the rails at any moment. That’s life. You can try to contain it, to mitigate all the possible risks, to do everything you can to get through this life safe and sound. But wow, that’s a lot of effort that has to be diverted from a life of everyday creativity and the purpose and passion that brings to our lives.
What would our lives look like if we embraced, even looked forward to the challenge of the inevitable mistakes and detours and saw them not as failures but as possibilities? How much freedom would we find in accepting this as part of the process? God, all the energy we could save if we didn’t worry about making this look easy, and most especially if we didn’t worry what others thought.
Have you ever been walking down the street when, for whatever reason, the wiring between your brain and your feet just goes a little wonky or you trip over a crack in the pavement and do this goofy move where you try to recover by flailing around and stumbling? What’s the first thing you do after that? Is it looking around and thinking, Oh my God I hope no one saw that? Or you do that weird fake-run thing, like you weren’t tripping, you were just speeding up a little but then you changed your mind? Who do we think we’re fooling? And then we spend the rest of the day dwelling on how stupid it must have looked. Why do we do that?
When I was still in comedy, part of my act involved juggling and things eventually go wrong and sometimes you drop the ball. I did a 90 minute stage show and in that time plenty can go wrong. You improvise and the joke falls flat, or you completely forget a line. You can react in two ways. You can pretend no one saw it, and try to cover it up, but you’re not fooling anyone so then things get kind of awkward. Or you can call the moment. Make a joke about it. Acknowledge that we all saw it. And the audience loves it because they know what it’s like to screw up. It happens all the time. I’ve had standing ovations for recovered mistakes that I never got from the bits that went to plan. I had bits in my show that became permanent parts of a routine that started out as one of these moments. The more you do this, the more comfortable you get with it. The more freedom you find in it. The less you fear the inevitable mistakes. So next time you trip while you’re walking and feel like it’s the first day with new feet, don’t pretend it didn’t happen. Throw your hands in the air. Smile or laugh. Take a bow that says “forget the fact that I tripped, did you see that amazing recovery?” And then do that in your creative work as well.
I guess what I’m saying is that mistakes happen and rather than something to be feared they are necessary to make us better than we are, to make our initial incomplete ideas and the work we do, better than it is. And with every one of them from which we gain those new directions and in which we find new raw materials, there will inevitably be people on the sidelines watching and we’re not fooling anyone, so you may as well call the moment, put on a big smile, and say, “did you see that?” Because that’s where the gold is. Not in avoiding every possible mistake, but taking risks, moving into the unknown, and no you have no idea what kind of mistakes are ahead of you, but you know you can make something great of them, something that is probably going to be bigger and more interesting, and more truly you, than if things had gone off without a hitch. Without mistakes and mutations there can be no evolution and growth in the creative life, only stagnation and stasis, and when’s the last time THOSE got a standing ovation?
Stop focusing on your mistakes, either past or present. Stop worrying about the ones in the future, too. Do your work. Look for the possibilities in all things, put your mind to reacting to the unexpected and recovering from the so-called failures. Every one of them contains some new piece of the puzzle that one day you’ll look back upon as unmistakably you.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If this podcast matters to you in some way, I’d be grateful if you shared it with others, and even though the podcast takes a break every 4th week, there’s no reason you shouldn’t still get your weekly kick in the creative pants. I’d love to send you On The Make on those 4th weeks and you can get that by going to ABeautifulAnarchy.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways To Get Your Groove Back. and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscriber to whom I’ll send a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy. Thanks so much for being part of this. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0