Dare to be wrong, the dream is alive

I found a little piece yesterday in the New York Times Magazine by Hugo Lindgren entitled "Be Wrong as Fast as You Can." In it, Mr. Lindgren recounts the "serial daydreaming" of his youth, and all the great creative ideas he had as a budding writer-to-be. Of ideas he had no shortage, but for one reason or another he could never get his act together to put them together into a finished product. He became an editor, a "respectable occupation" while working on  "the Masterwork of Spectacular Brilliance that would eventually define [him]." With time he increasingly felt the weight of Mark Jacobson's "Big Fear," a sense that one's regular job is slowly stealing one's capacity to pursue one's dreams; that someday he would wake up and think, "'Those who can't write, edit.'"

I recognize the problem, as well as the dream and the fear, having experienced versions of them all at some point. I suspect many people have ideas about life; what they want to do, what they'd like to be, and where they'd like to go. But it is equally clear many of these ideas never make it beyond thought. Perhaps this is for the better at times, since some things we desire in thought turn out to be a pain when they are realized in reality. Yet at other times a great deal of good may come from converting a thought into actual practice. Mr. Lindgren's example suggests this is not always easy, and while a number of solutions might be offered as a remedy, Mr. Lindgren centers on one which I found rather interesting: "Be wrong as fast as you can."

It seems to me at the heart of this statement is action. While foresight can reveal many issues with an idea, it is only through action that one faces the task of converting imaginings into real things. Says Mr. Lindgren:

"Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution."

Getting to the bottom of these "endless problems" does seem, at its root, about figuring out how an idea might become a self-contained reality. It's disparate threads, which hang together nicely among the seas of one's own thought, require new hangings and knots to make it stand on its own under the light of day. The challenge is sometimes quite great, and often as not we give up after hitting the first few snags. According to Mr. Lindgren, however, the snags are actually a positive development, for they show where we go wrong, and the faster we learn that, the faster we can begin the process of editing and correction. Accordingly, the setbacks reveal where change is required to convert thoughts into real thing. The trick it seems is not about getting it all right in your head before beginning; rather, it seems to involve diving in and seeing where your idea needs some adjustment to succeed in the world beyond the mind.

Happy Sunday, friends :)