If I had stayed within my own head…
I am often baffled by my own career path. The route I took to get to where I am today, professionally, would be the equivalent to traveling from Milwaukee, WI to Venice, Italy by way of Albuquerque, NM (… via unicycle, backwards, and only riding on even-numbered days during months that have fewer than 31 days).
When you’re a kid, you tend to believe that there is a logical method to every aspect of life. It begins when you read the classics like Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” (oh boy, here he goes again with the kids’ books… this guy really needs to expand his reading list.) Don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this analogy, and I promise to get there faster than the aforementioned backwards unicycle.
In the book, kids learn that a caterpillar pops out of an egg, eats a ton of food, builds a cocoon, and then pops out as a butterfly. While the underlying details of ‘Where did the egg come from?’ and ‘What is the cocoon made out of?’ and ‘Where would a caterpillar get access to salami, swiss cheese AND chocolate cake before anyone stopped him?’ kind of get glanced over, it doesn’t appear to matter to the average child. That’s how it works. That’s what the book says. As Yul Brynner said, So let it be written, so let it be done!
And so kids begin to develop this, ‘If This Then That’ way of seeing the world. If I eat my vegetables, I will grow up to be big and strong. If I hit my brother with a baseball bat, I will go in time out. If I go to school to become a journalist, I will get a job in the press box at Wrigley Field.
I’m not sure when it happens, but somewhere in between listening to your parents read Eric Carle to you and you reading Eric Carle to your kids, ‘If This Then That’ breaks down a bit. It goes from being ‘If This Then That’ to ‘If This Then That*’.
Ah, the asterisk. The footnote. The blemish of the written word. The CYA of ABCs. The Get Out of Jail Free card in the never-ending monopoly game of storytelling.
Personally I love the asterisk. It’s like having a treasure hunt in the middle of a story. The excitement only builds depending on how far away the footnote resides. What is the author about to tell me? Will he immediately contradict his last statement by providing statistical evidence that he was full of shit? Or will he actually have proof that his theory is backed up by more than Wikipedia? What nugget of information am I about to feast on?
In this scenario, our asterisk limits the liability of the ‘If This Then That’ theorem. It says that yes, if you go to school and study hard with the intent to become X when you graduate, then yes, you will have increased your likelihood to become X, versus if you had gone to school to become Y, and then tried to become X, or if you had not gone to school at all, or if you had gone to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
However, you have ‘increased your likelihood’ in the same capacity that one increases their likelihood of winning the lottery by buying a bunch of tickets vs. just one. Technically yes, better chances, but at the end of the day, you’re just as likely to pop out a butterfly as you are a kangaroo.
This can be frustrating at first. Your inner 4-year-old is expecting butterfly. When the cocoon opens up and a kangaroo jumps out, he flips his lid. We can’t live in a world like this! This is anarchy! What’s next? Babies don’t arrive by stork? Santa Claus isn’t real? (wow, we lie a lot as parents.)
But that’s OK. Once you suppress your inner 4-year-old, you realize that sometimes surprises can be fun, and you might actually like what you end up with more than what you had been expecting.
Take a page from John Sweeney, co-owner and executive producer of the Brave New Workshop, America’s oldest satirical comedy theatre. John was a farm boy in Wisconsin, played college football, sold corporate real estate and now runs an improve comedy shop, wrote a best-seller, and is a professional belly dancer for the Minnesota Timberwolves. While it may not be surprising that a Wisconsin farm boy and former football player grew up to be a belly dancer, it certainly doesn’t appear to make sense that he would write a book or run a theatre. What happened there?
Enter the backwards unicyle.
In his book, The Innovative Mindset, (see, yes, I totally read more than just kids books!) John speaks of the importance of seeing the world from different perspectives. He writes:
When I intentionally put on my listening hat, especially when listening to people who are much different than I am, I’m very quickly taken into a new realm. I am a stowaway on someone else’s idea ship. Their ideas take me to new perspectives, to new angles: It’s not just new information that I’m gaining from them, it’s the ability to look at the entire question or challenge differently than I ever would have if I had stayed within my own head.
Staying within one’s own head can be safe and comfortable. It’s easy, convenient and would even appear to be logical in most cases. But it can also be very limiting.
There’s a world of headcases out there (and i mean that in the nicest way possible) and almost every one of us enjoys seeing the world from their perspective, even if we don’t admit it. This is why we enjoy reading books or watching movies. Today, people are investing millions of dollars in virtual reality. People are literally sticking their heads in cardboard to view the world from a different perspective.
So take the time to ask permission to come aboard someone else’s idea ship. Spend a few days at sea and see where you end up. I highly recommend it. Afterall, I took the backwards unicycle to Venice and popped out a kangaroo, and that has made all the difference.
