Do Something Foolish to Completion

Are we ever fair enough to our stupidest selves?

Among friends I know who have found success, technically or creatively, the work they did that "struck" was often something that, at the start, seemed foolish. They were ideas you couldn’t pitch without kneejerk derision. Still, they toiled over those seemingly foolish ideas for months to years until their fruition proved all those doubts wrong.

There were of course a sizable proportion that did fail, and failed hard. However, while the failed ideas charted a predictable rise and fall, what made the successful ideas successful was often surprising, unpredictable, and seemed to directly contradict notions about the world nested in predictions about why that idea should have failed.

It made me think: is there some aspect of what makes an idea seem foolish that could be a factor in its success?

What we see and live in everyday isn't the real world, but our brain's estimation of it. Everyone is at all times navigating a multi-sensory hallucination set 80 milliseconds in the past. When making only short extrapolations over time and space, our brain does its job with a predictable accuracy. However, when our thinking has to stretch into the future and consider what we cannot know for certain, we must scaffold our sense of reality with increasingly murky approximations.

Cognitive dissonance is when our mental models of the world don’t square with reality. Our instincts abhor this because they naturally cling to the reliable feedback loops that feed our mental frameworks. We are biased against that which violates our mental models, and instinctively dismiss actions and pursuits that aren't primed to reward us.

This bias, I believe, leads to many people pre-estimating their failure, and not trying to do anything beyond what they have a history of positive feedback in. In attempting to preoptimize, interesting creative or technical ideas are squashed by our natural deferment to our mental models.

The problem with this is that most peoples’ memories of positive feedback are likely of things most people do and work hard on all the time. Our shared ambitions converge to low-risk, well charted fields which naturally saturate and make prodigious success nearly impossible for those without preternatural aptitudes.

Seemingly foolish paths are however far less traveled, and offer greater bounty to those who can trek though their uncertainty. To work a foolish idea to its completion gives precise feedback along every rough edge of the process. You enter a realm of constant discovery. You realize that what you perceived as the issues of the idea weren't of that thing existing in the real world, but in your mental model of the world.

By venturing into something which you once only knew as a cloudy notion in your head, you can make future judgments not on conjecture, but on the much more complex and detailed edges of memory.

In fact, the seeming foolishness of an idea acts as a pruning atmosphere within which precision is necessary. To execute a strange idea well, you must constantly walk the wire, and keep a mind wide open to all dangers and pitfalls. The work you are creating has aspects that betray the heuristics and cultural parameters you were taught. In doing or making something that is seemingly unwise, you must execute it in a way that proves its merits. A field not yet optimized and economized offers less certainty, but potentially far greater rewards.

The time we have is precious, fleeting, and as a rule, mostly unremarkable. Delve into your note-taking app, an old journal, or some vaguely defined project a friend once hit you up to try. Abandon your bias that some an idea is stupid, pointless, or meritless due when its value isn’t effortlessly self-evident. Don’t be afraid to go with your gut, it’s likely much wiser than you give it credit for.