Introduction.

Abundance can be a problem, one that is much more common that we accept to realize. Like Leonia citizens in Invisible cities of Italo Calvino we are so concerned with having more —especially more novel things— that we never stop to think about the waste.

In particular, physical waste is much more familiar to us but we seem very reluctant to produce “metaphysical” waste. Our ideas, our plans and our work often remain the same to what we originally thought about them even when the need for change is clear; doing a first —for example— and an only first draft is a vice that seeks to avoid the pain of accepting being wrong.

Maybe it is the mere ownership effect —the tendency to value more things that are our own compared to things of equal value but that we do not possess— but it also may be an implicit idea inside our heads that tells us that we are maybe not enough.

Maturity.

Something I have noticed in different sources of mythology and my own experience is that ingenuity and maturity are concepts that are associated with age, but go far beyond our biology. They are used to represent ideas that are fundamental to how we behave as a society. The mature, normally associated with the old is a person who already has lived enough to see much of how reality behaves, he is extremely suited to survive -as he proves explicitly with his own existence– so he tries to teach the youngsters what to do to keep them alive.

The strength of the mature is knowing what to do; his weakness is being too sure about it. What has worked before does not guarantee future success. Maturity and wisdom work very well in many domains, but trying to always live by precedents is dangerous once you consider how reality is characterized by its uniqueness; “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man” as Heraclitus once said.

On the other hand, ingenuity, normally associated with the young, is the power of creating things that are often invisible to the experienced mind. Creativity is the skill to see what already exists and find new ways to use it, young people are naturally more creative because they are exposed to everything but know very little to how exactly reality works —and even can very easily become overwhelmed—this allows them to formulate naïve but inventive hypotheses of what should or ought to exist.

Ingenuity’s fundamental weakness is that they do not actually know how to transcend their ideas to actual things. They need to explore, to fail, again and again until they find something that can bring them one step closer to their objectives.

Creating something new that also works is very difficult. Tracing any new path unequivocally means that you will encounter more trouble than you could ever think. Facing reality is surely a difficult task; no matter how much effort and good practice you involve in the creation of your material it will not be as good as you imagine it.

Daydreaming is easy. Everything that stays in your imagination has never to be tested or judged by anyone but you, you can deceive yourself and rationalize that your beautiful creation could change the world or be a true masterpiece but the truth is that we are just building castles in the sky, that means that is not as satisfactory or productive as building a mundane but real, castle in the sand. Fleeting, imperfect things are better than an magnus opus of the imagination.

Masterpieces are never the first work. Mastery requires practice and in practice you should always be willing to screw up, to miss the mark and to fail. The long period of suffering and intense work that precedes quality productions is a must, not a need only for those who are not talented enough.

The artist in some way has to deal with one of the most paradoxical and challenging conundrums: you need to master your technical skills —maturity— while also being open and creative, willing to go beyond the limits of what is known —ingenuity.

I am not saying that every artist must have a balance of both, there are people who enjoy hyperrealism—paintings that appear to be pictures— or experimental music, like those of John Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono. But the artists who really touch my soul are those who both have a decent background and skill in their technical abilities but also know how to experiment and congregate different styles and novel sounds.

I have a lot of examples, but to name a few are: Vincent Van Gogh and Zdzisław Beksiński in painting, Shawn James and Bad bunny in music, Fabio Viale and Michelangelo in sculpture, bgxgrim and diamante_murru in tattoos and Chris Bumstead and Jeff Nippard in bodybuilding… Yes, bodybuilding is an art for me.

As said by the performance artist Marina Abramović “If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity” to embody the balance between ingenuity and maturity you have to consciously and consistently remind yourself that your will never know enough but nonetheless you should always try it. To leave your heart in the name of the ideal knowing with confidence that your production is not going to be ideal.

Blundering.

This is where the magic of allowing yourself to fail is present. Doing good work is very difficult. You have to both deliver a lot of sensations while also maintaining intrigue and continuity. Even if we have a strong biological tendency to prefer high intensity sensations in a short period of time —it is literally addictive— we cannot compress everything into its smallest part, imagine the most beautiful house but is only half meter tall, yes it is beautiful, but is hard to call that a house.

Not only having to balance the length and intensity of your work, you are often expected to do something novel, that means that you are purposefully left alone in an unfamiliar environment commanded to do things that you certainly do not know how to do well. Your chances are very low, you have millions of ways to futures available to you in which you can “fail” and many less in which your work is decent and only one in which you reach perfection.

You can only guess which way takes to where, nonetheless you still have to try, to bend reality into a definite product in which your expectations will mirror his quality. As I said before, you will most likely never reach that possibility in the first try but that does not mean you are failing, it just means that you are not quite there yet, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” as American inventor Thomas Edison said. The only true fail is surrender.

Until you do not surrender —or die— you still have the opportunity to try again. Mistakes are the path to greatness, not an undesirable byproduct, we should welcome them because they are essential to reduce the amount of available paths to perfection. A failure or a setback in this perspective is the opportunity to narrow down the possibilities of getting the prize.

It is not that the great are just lucky, they succeed by their refusal to stop. They used the information of their personal interpretation of why something failed to completely destroy millions of ineffective paths. It is a much safer bet to try to guess a number between 0 to 99 that of 0 to 10,000. If we use blundering as a tool we can improve in nearly everything which allows repetitive attempts without fatal consequences.

When we allow ourselves to actually enjoy the process we reduce the available paths to surrender. We can begin to experiment, to listen, to try, to innovate and to destroy. We can choose to inhabit both worlds: to enjoy working —making our adherence to the process easier— and to gradually improve —encouraging us to try again.

How to blunder.

That we need to make mistakes to improve does not mean that we should actively take part in every problem we can encounter. For a problem to be good we require it to resemble what future, natural challenges we will encounter later in our pursuit of perfection.

That means that the first step to blunder correctly is to choose what we will blunder. This entirely depends on the nature of your pursuit, but a good guideline can be to ask “What I would want my work to look like in 5 years from now on?”, the response is your desired quality. Focus on building a hierarchy in which you prioritize the things that have the greatest influence in the desired quality of your work.

For a writer those priorities could look like:

• Read everyday
• Write everyday
• Public your work

But for a natural bodybuilder these priorities could look like:

• Train all your body with high intensity
• Have a proper nutrition
• Get plenty of rest

This hierarchy should normally not go up to more than 5 items. That many people fail to leverage the things that actually get results that is best to humble ourselves and actually consolidate the basics first.

Once we have a clear image of what we want to do we should try to improve each hierarchical principle with these 4 factors:

• A genuine try
• A clear framework of time
• A throughout assessment of success or failure
• A small and actionable list of “critical” improvements

A genuine try is when your focus, your resources and your effort are all used smartly and completely. It should feel hard but not impossible, it should take time and careful thought. You should leverage your input to do the best that you can realistically do, not the best possible scenario.

Remember that our effort and focus are variables, messing with them is wrong because we are creating unnecessary chaos. Adding these uncertain items into our hierarchy only serves to make everything harder to understand and to control.

Do not overthink it, standardize your input and use it wisely to the task at hand. For example there will be times where working with light or moderate effort or focus can be the way to go but remember that we are prone to reserve our energy as a survival instinct. We are hardwired to be lazy so be skeptical when you feel you are doing “everything you can”.

The purpose of the deadline is to limit our procrastination and actually get us to work. Even if we believe we are doing our best it is rare to not work harder when you know that you must finish before a certain date. It is important to note that we also must deliberately limit how much time we bring into our work.

There should be time designed for everything: to try, to learn and to judge. Remember that more does not necessarily mean better. Schedule your available hours appropriately and remember to stop when you are done. We need time to consolidate our improvements. Work on another thing while you wait to start again.

The assessment is where the magic truly happens. You have to clearly define how you measure success or failure for this try, not the ideal that you envisioned earlier.

What we measure is what we optimize. If you measure the wrong variable then you will get the wrong result. Be as clear and binary as you can. It must be obvious if you hit the mark or not, this is not the place for ambiguity.

The small and actionable is for having something to aim for the next time. As in the other steps you want to be as clear as possible, depending on what you are doing the questions will vary, but a good place to start is “What of the hierarchical principles did I miss the most?”. You can also ask “What small and immediate improvements could make my work closer to the ideal?”.

If you are a novice you will probably find that your work has many areas that can be improved upon, but you should strive to act mainly in your hierarchical principles. The immediate improvements are a bonus, they are the pebbles, not the boulders, do not give them greater importance that they deserve.

Conclusion.

The process is a loop, it needs to be repeated to be effective. It is okay to fail while you try this approach, the method —any method— is a skill by itself. Be free to change how you define the principles of the methods and how you apply them but remember that you must follow a system.

This method is simply stating explicitly the way we learn in our real lives: we try, we wait for feedback, we fail or succeed and finally we respond appropriately. Do not let yourself be fooled by any methodology that contradicts the principles of our nature.

The methods that work are the ones that both: respect and consider our nature and are focused to bring the desired outcomes. The Feynman technique is a brilliant example of a method that works (if you are curious you can compare the Feynman technique with the guideline in this post and prove to yourself that they lie under the same principles).

This post is both a communication device to share standards in which I believe and also the standard itself. I am not sure of this post, I feel like it is incomplete but I will regardless publish it because I said I will. This is my best attempt at my ideal and I love it, not in regard to his insufficiency, but because of it.

Reflection.

We are constantly being bombed from unrealistic expectations coming from everywhere. Many powerful figures —politicians, leaders, parents, etc.— have the vice of trying to make everything smooth and perfect, to have everything planned before we even begin to exist, nevertheless the true underlying objective of any paternalist doctrine —that includes religion, philosophy, government and culture— is to teach the individual enough to increase his probability of survival, well being and productivity to the whole.

They are necessary and they will always be, but that does not mean we ought to follow everything that they state, they are living productions also striving for the ideal. Many of them fail to articulate precisely the need for hard work, sacrifice, risk and uncertainty required to have a good life.

In some sense, our collective unconscious —a concept created by Carl Jung— thrives to make our personal experience more and more biased into a willful blindness and seek of pleasure, traits that are often characteristic in children; we appear to seek an infantilization.

I encourage you to not let you fall prey to the false promise of eternal safety and security that doing nothing will deliver. Having ingenuity is great, being irresponsible is not, that we want to apply wisdom of young people does not mean we should be kids.

Pretending to be a kid does not make your life better, the desire or attempt to return to our childhood is not virtuous, being mature and confronting your challenges with the eyes wide open is.

Go out and screw up as many times as you need! Be brave, have courage, do not let some little discomfort prevent you from living your desired life. Consolidate your maturity and your ingenuity, so the former can be the strength that you need to survive and the later can be the hope that convinces you that there is something worth fighting for.

Be willing to miss, so tomorrow you are closer to succeed.

Without anything more to say, goodbye.