Only Fools Charge In

“We have vision, delusion and hallucination and I want to know which one this is.”

-         Anonymous

It’s amusing that most creative ideas come from outside of planned work. On a related note, why do ground breaking ideas come from college kid run companies (Yahoo!, Google, Facebook…), not well established companies?

The surprising answer is one word: Ignorance! They didn’t know better. Malcolm Gladwell from his article titled “The Gift of Doubt”:

“The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.”

Or take what Albert O. Hirschman, an economist, has to say:

“Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

Hirschman again, tongue in cheek, felt that creativity is like Christianity in preferring those who “stray”:

“…strikingly paralleling Christianity’s oft expressed preference for the repentant sinner over the righteous man who never strays from the path.”

Eugenio Colorni had to this to say about doubting:

“ Doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles.”

Which is why he wanted to “prove Hamlet wrong”. How? As Gladwell puts it:

“Hamlet shouldn’t have been frozen by his doubts; he should have been freed by them.”

It is kind of amusing that Hirschman could even quote Nietzsche, a guy whose philosophy was all about power and supermen, on something as intangible as creativity: “That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” Or if the problem didn’t wipe you out, it just might have forced you to find a way out.

I guess engineers shouldn’t scoff at philosophy: there might be something to it after all.