The TED talk to watch, by Sir Ken Robinson.  It’s worth watching in its entirety (though it’s likely you already have), but if you only have a few seconds, go to the 5:29 mark.   Or just read this excerpt:

Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we’re running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, ‘All children are artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.’

(out of focus.  she hit her head while trying to act serious.)

My mom says “whoopsie poopsie.”  She says it often.  She needs (heh, heh) to say it often. 

I grew up in a family where spilling things, breaking things, and making messes of things were daily, if not hourly, events.  My mom attributed it to genes, which somehow excused it all.  I don’t know that I was ever reprimanded for that sort of mistake.  I come by klutz honestly.

I don’t even remember any fights with my parents over the other mistakes I made as a kid–and there are a few doozies, let me tell you.  And I learned from them.  What I do remember is a fabulously dramatic fight in which my mom was frustrated with me for not giving “it” my all–Chopin or Calculus or whatever.  In what I thought was justified exhasperation, I threw my arms in the air and wailed, “I just want to be average!  Can’t you just let me be average?”

It is, after all, easier to just be “average”–to not attempt new things, to not risk making mistakes.  Mistakes are punished by teachers, critics, bosses, parents.   We fear making them, make them anyway, and then regret them.  Whether it’s a sippy cup, an invisible marker, an online compatibility test, an automatic camera setting, a painting technique, any tried-and-true formula–it’s a crutch.  And I think these crutches, designed to prevent mistakes, inhibit creativity.

Sure there’s a right way to do a thing.  But doing everything the exact precise correct unoriginal way every time…  bleah.

Some of the world’s greatest creative geniuses are all about the mistake:

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. (Joseph Campbell)

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)

From error to error, one discovers the entire truth. (Sigmund Freud)

So here I am, doing my part to celebrate mistakes.   The blog is just thrown together, and will likely evolve.  Check out the “About” page.  And…  join me?