Do you think you're smart enough to do it wrong?

Do you ever worry about failure, about not doing it right?  The humans among us naturally worry about such things.  But what would happen if you tried something fully intending to fail?

Earlier this month I read a post on World's Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne where he challenged his readers to a bad poetry contest.  Initially I thought it was simply interesting because unless you are a poet and you know it, anybody could jot down a couple of lines of awkward and unnatural prose.

Later that afternoon I thought the contest was brilliant.  Why?  Because we all have an understanding of what "bad" means.  Our vocabulary for describing what's wrong is stronger than the vocabulary we use to identify what's right.  We're well-trained at finding out why something doesn't work.  It is not unusual or far-fetched for us to know more about what we don't like than what we do.

So consider this: if you think you know what "bad poetry" looks like, try writing some.  Somewhere in your mental archives you have a list of rules that bad poetry violates.  You know what not to do.  So write some poetry where you don't do those things.  Just try it.

It's surprising how creative you have to be to write something that is intentionally bad and cringe-worthy. Even more surprising?  It's a little fun.  That's right.  Fun.  As in loosened up and relaxed and playful.

And that's where the beauty lies.  By trying to intentionally fail, you have to address your individual assumptions about what failure looks like.  Thinking a certain way is not at all the same as acting a certain way, and when you try to put your assumptions about failure into action, suddenly the assumptions don't feel so absolute.

What are some other examples where you claim to know what "bad" looks like, what defines failure?  Think about your resume, the proposal you've been meaning to write, the idea you've been wanting to pitch to your boss if you could only figure out how.

If you were going to do these things intending to do them wrong, what would that look like?  What are the criteria you came up with for making those judgements?  Now flip them around.  Congratulations, you are now your own how-to guru!

-Andrea