Misteaks

"It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something."

Ornette Coleman

You have to love Abel Tasman.

He was the 17^th century Dutch explorer who heard about exotic islands in the Southern Sea.  In 1642, Tasman went on his first exploration to the South Seas to find them.  He sailed south from Java and discovered a number of small islands, then sailed east and discovered a much bigger island that he promptly named for himself…Tasmania.  Then he sailed east and north and discovered more islands including the huge island that we now call New Zealand.  Then back up to New Guinea, discovering even more along the way. 

It was a stirring venture that won him great acclaim back in Holland, except for one little problem.  Tasman somehow managed to sail completely around Australia without finding it.  I mean Australia…only the largest island in the world.

I keep that story in mind when I think about trying to accomplish something because although it was a huge mistake, Tasman’s journey did open up the South Seas to more exploration and trade.  So in a way, the mistake was itself the breakthrough.  This suggests that learning to accept mistakes is part of the process of success and being willing to fumble and bumble along matters because you never know when you might also stumble onto a creative shore.

The French writer Colette said that a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new and that is a good point.  It is the trying of new things that is the engine of creativity.  Thinking in new ways, exploring new ideas, trying new combinations.  Pushing on in spite of errors, dead ends, stumbles.  Most people run from mistakes, but to be creative you have to not only accept them but also love them, embrace them. 

Accounting may not thrive on this but creativity does and that is why any decent Ingenarium should include a healthy chunk of what we might logically misspell as…misteaks.

One reason for this is that you can never know ahead of time which new avenues lead to dead ends and which to gateways.  So you have to pursue them all and see what happens.

This is especially true because creative mistakes often lead to discoveries that can turn out to be more important than what you thought you were looking for.

Think Alexander Fleming.

He was the chemist who found bacteria growing where it should not have been in one of the petri dishes in his lab.  Most people – probably most chemists too – would have tossed it into the trash but he started wondering what it was and why it had grown there and that led to the discovery of penicillin.  Science is filled with these kinds of stories.

Percy Spencer in the 1940s noticed that the candy bar in his pocket melted whenever he was near a magnetron, the power tube in a radio set.  Again, most folks with errorphobia – which includes most folks – would just have stopped carrying around candy bars.  But Spencer became fascinated by the mistake itself and began to study why microwaves would affect food.  That little snafu led to the invention of the microwave oven.

Teflon, nylon, Vaseline, x-rays – and most important of all Silly Putty – the list goes on and on.  They were all the results of accidental discoveries, mistakes that led to creative breakthroughs.

The trick is being alert to them and open to detours rather than annoyed by them and obsessed with the highway.  This is not easy.  Plenty of mistakes lead to breakdowns rather than breakthroughs and it would be nice to have a rule to tell the difference.  But we never do.  It is simply the ability to be fascinated by mistakes that our Ingenarium needs.

All we can lose is our dignity…which is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.