Do the Terrible Things You Know Won't Work First

My old friend Stuart drops wisdom bombs while turning coffee spills into creative exercises, works of art, and creative block-busting devices.

Take this one for instance:

Do the terrible things you know won't work first.

Just get them out of your system.

This is actually how I want to look at a lot of things in life.  How I want to garden - how I build structures on our land - how I try to develop permaculture systems, community, and other worthwhile endeavors.  

Paralyzed by a blank piece of paper?  Maybe spill some coffee on it and see what emerges.

Staring at your lawn too long?  Can't figure out what goes where?  Just go to town, sling some sod, shove some cuttings into the ground.  See what takes.

When we relocated to my family farm 4 years ago and began putting our first garden plot in, we thought hey, we have this old Alice Chalmers tractor and a 3-bottom plough - let's just turn the grass under, just this once, and we'll be off to the races.  So I ran the plough through the plot a few times, then my ignorance got the best of me - the tractor broke down and had to be yanked out by a bigger tractor.  And we were stuck with these massive ruts in the ground where we wanted to have a nice garden.  Without much choice really, we moved forward making the best of it.  A few ruts turned into wood-filled trenches, which we then covered with dirt - our first handful of hugelkulturs.  A few ruts become mulch-filled paths between rows of perennial herbs.  A particularly swoopy and deep rut became a bit of a de-facto water catchment, which became a water feature, which became a lazy-river/leaky pond for the kiddos to play in while the Mrs. and I worked to establish the plot that first hot summer.



Was it perfect?  No - still isn't - not by a long shot,  Was it great?  Absolutely.  It had a stunning, whimsical and improvisational charm.  A flow we still prefer to the linear rows of some of our surrounding plots.  And it is still developing and unfolding as we live and work in it - the main productive epicenter of our growing medicinal herb patch.  

As an audio engineer and record producer, I would often find myself sitting with a work tape for a song that I knew could be great, if I could just unlock its potential.  The work tape would probably be just guitar and vocal, or piano and vocal, often just a rough, noisy, cluttery idea of a song.  To get started, I would invariably have to just start making some noise, interacting with the piece, moving stuff around.  Grab a ukulele or a kazoo.  Turn on some weird effect.  Almost always, like 99% of the time, these initial noises wouldn't make the final track - but they were steps to get where I was going.
In fact, when new recording artists or songwriters would come into my studio and I would ask them what kind of project they had in mind, they would almost always articulate some grand vision, a magnum opus work of perfection.  Then they'd ask for my advice.
I'd tell them to go make a dozen crappy EPs.  Just the first 6 songs to come out of the hatch when they open their mouths.  It's all chaff, anyway.  Make it and put it out there.  Give it away and - this is important - ignore all the people sitting on their hands critiquing you while doing nothing, producing nothing.  It is easy to sit around being an unproductive expert.  What is hard is sitting down and doing the hard work of producing.  

Wrap your head around this and watch your garden, your sketchbook, your music grow exponentially.  

Working with Paul has involved a lot of this.  Several times a week we'll be talking about this & that, and he'll say "Let's make a list of a dozen ideas along these lines."  It's usually one of these throw-away ideas that sparks the idea that winds up being a keeper.

Two different memories were triggered by this.

1- a high school kid we hired as a laborer one time, to help tear down a large barn type building. We'd get to over-analyzing how to do a thing, and he would come up with some wild cartoon-type idea. Modifying that cartoon often became a solution. "Well, we can't do it with explosives... but we could rig a winch over there..."
As Beau said, "It's usually one of these throw-away ideas that sparks the idea". That kid had some great 'throw away' ideas, silly as that sounds on the surface of it. Or, to quote Paul- "try 100 things, 2 will work, but you never know which 2".

2- a good friend back in my early 20s who was purely artistic (unlike me, lol!), and I was so envious of her talent, but when I actually spent a long weekend with her, I was shocked by how much utter crap she created. I realized her amazing results were really only about 10 or 20 percent of everything she actually tried. And- I really think this is a key point- she would laugh at the crap and just move on!. I look at expensive supplies and think 'I don't want to waste these', but the artist/creator plunges in, knowing there has to be waste and mistakes to get to the good stuff.
I suppose the ultimate analogy might be mining- a little bit of gold requires a large pile of tailings.

There's a couple of different things going on here. One is getting started, overcoming some paralysis... anxiety, uncertainty, perfectionism, doubt. The other is experience, Malcom Gladwell's mischaracterized 10,000 hours, which you learn to be an expert by doing/researching. So in the beginning especially, you will do some terrible things, but it's how to learn! Mistakes are often more enlightening than successes.

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

How does someone know it won't work if they have not done it?

How can someone do the terrible things you know won't work first?


source

Anne Miller wrote:How does someone know it won't work if they have not done it?

Experience, it's the chicken and egg problem. Or being told it won't work, whether or not that's actually true.

Anne Miller wrote:How can someone do the terrible things you know won't work first?

Trying. You can only assume the things won't work, until you do them and find out that they don't work. You can't see around that corner from the start, you have to go there to look. Sometimes, you DO know that something won't work, but it gets you to a place where you can see the next step.

I think this is why I find Permies such an agreeable corner of the internet.  And also why I find permaculture to be such an agreeable design method.  

Some of the Permaculture Characteristics I find agreeable:

PC 005 Ecosystems over rigid formulae
PC 006 Emergent relational webs over linear frameworks
PC 007 A keen eye to what's developing both in real-time and over the long haul
PC 008 Willingness to pause and take stock
PC 009 Focus on motion (movement is progress, stagnation is declination)
PC 010 Acknowledgement that there is always vastly more happening than we can be aware of at any given time, in any given context
PC 011 Acknowledgement that there is never a single right way to approach a challenge.  Many harmful ways to avoid, and usually at least a handful of identifiable, viable pathways

Kenneth Elwell wrote:Sometimes, you DO know that something won't work, but it gets you to a place where you can see the next step.

It gets you somewhere...which is farther (further?) than sitting there.  And often, the doing puts you in the moment, which can lead to inspiration and more...just plain FUN...than only thinking about it, or watching someone else do something.

And if you try to incorporate the permaculture goal of obtaining a return, then you often do...whereas it's not quite as likely as inaction.

Even if you do the meditation and law of attraction stuff, you still need to go do something...the money/job/relationship/new house/whatever doesn't come ring your doorbell.  (although it might be fun if that happened sometimes!  haha)

Psych Major here! This discussion is related to my experience of my Fixed Mindset vs. the Growth Mindset I have been trying to...grow.



I want all projects to be perfect right away--i.e., my whole garden ecosystem has to be TOTALLY thought out and optimized from the beginning before I should even plant the first seed!!!

Uh, nope--actually, that's not how life works. Permaculture gave me the understanding of building big from a solid small start.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:Psych Major here! This discussion is related to my experience of my Fixed Mindset vs. the Growth Mindset I have been trying to...grow.

Rachel, this is a powerful contrast!  Thank you for sharing.

Now I wanna see info about shifting from Fixed to Growth.

There's a book!

https://www.biblio.com/book/mindset-new-psychology-success-dweck-carol/d/1527185859

Yes, thank you !

I only work with one person and we are so diametrically opposed. I think a lot of frustration will be eliminated now that I understand why he does what he does.

Again, thank you.


(By the way; I was told 30 years ago to always study phycology because we never live alone. I adapted that and have done really well over the years understanding better why people do what they do. My girlfriend has a Masters Degree is phycology and we have some very deep conversations).

Don't know why, but this thread triggered a memory:
When my wife and I would go out to eat, many times we would order our desert to be brought out first.
Always threw the servers off guard.

Beau Davidson wrote:
Rachel, this is a powerful contrast!  Thank you for sharing.

Now I wanna see info about shifting from Fixed to Growth.

Big Life Journal is a great resource too, especially for kids and teens. If you get in the email list, they send out a weekly activity/discussion topic for kids and a weekly thing for adults too. All about developing growth mindset. They have a really fun podcast too.

If I didn't try things that were supposed to fail, I would never have grown potatoes, of all things! 😂

That success led to me trying to grow eggplant which I was told definitely can't grow and fruit in my climate. But instead- success (with the right locally grown seeds)!

Of course I've had a lot of real failures too. But they are really just learning experiences.

This reminds of the story of George Bernard Dantzig.  Solving problems that he didn't know were unsolvable.  

When hiring engineers I like to ask how many big problems did you totally mess up.  The engineers that messed up the most, always make you more money.  The willingness to fail will make things better in the long run. It is a rare trait.