Saturday, May 14, 2011

RRR (tm)

Anything Really Really Real (RRR) (tm) has a chance of utter failure. A garden is the easiest example of this: You plant a seed and it grows or it does not grow; it produces food or it does not.

It seems as though there are a thousand ways to fail and only one way to succeed but, really, there are a hundred thousand ways to fail and at least a thousand and maybe ten thousand ways to succeed.

Ah, but all successes are not the same. One might "succeed" by having 1# of potatoes produce 10# of potatoes, while someone else might succeed by having 1# of potatoes produce 100# of potatoes. Significant difference. If the 10# gets you through the winter, great, but if you starve to death in March instead of November, I'd have trouble labeling that "success".

Likewise, all failures are not the same. Failure that you learn from and that doesn't kill you is good. But learning means that you actually change your behavior. People seem to have a great deal of trouble doing this, being far more prone to doing the same thing and just painting it a different color. This is a little like eating your seed potatoes.

Failure could, of course, make you give up. Which would be bad.

But the worst kind of faulure is the one that doesn't risk.

So here I have this horse. This is not a story I'm telling, a tale I'm making up. This is not my fantasy. And either I can do it or I can't. I don't have facilities or equipment or even mentors who could make it easier. Not reasons for excuses but causes for more creativity.

Creativity lives in the really really real.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That thing we were talking about over in that other place, well, these two lines are a large part of my dunderheadedness.

Failure could, of course, make you give up. Which would be bad.

But the worst kind of faulure is the one that doesn't risk.


There's more, of course, so damn it, you and I are going to HAVE to get together and talk sometime.