Obviously it’s important to be right. To make the right decisions, to answer questions correctly, to be able to distinguish between true and false.
If you can not separate correlation from causation, you will believe storks bring the children, as there is a statistical correlation between the number increase and decrease of storks and child births.
If you can’t separate serious from solemn, you will miss the heartwarming point when someone cracks a joke at a funeral.
If you are unable to distinguish between fact based opinions and opinion based facts, you will soon join the tinfoil hat brigade.
You have to be right, based on serious solid facts.
If not, you will never be a good accountant, waiter, engineer, journalist…
But you also need to be wrong, every now and then. On purpose.
If you are never wrong, you will never evolve.
One of the things humour and creativity has in common, is that they appear when you connect dots belonging in different frameworks.
Let me give you some examples:
The legal age of drinking alcohol in Sweden is 18, but many don’t begin drinking until about 21. In Denmark we start drinking at 9:30.
Cigarettes are no more dangerous than squirrels. They only become harmful when you put them in your mouth and set them on fire.
A material developed for space crafts, but not good enough for reentering the atmosphere, is now used for making frying pans.
A guy tried to invent a superglue that would dry immediately and be able to hold heavy items. He failed completely, the result was the opposite, and is today used for Post-Its.
By switching the framework something new, smart and perhaps even funny can happen, that would not have happened if you kept within the boundaries.
The most important ability in science is the willingness to be wrong.
You make a thesis, test it, correct the inaccuracies, adapt the thesis, have it peer-reviewed, correct the flaws and update the thesis, and do it all again.
If you are not willing to be wrong that will be the end of science.
X-rays are harmful to humans. If we had known this from the start, we would have slapped a big, fat warning label on them and kept them away from people. However, X-rays have saved countless human lives.
We have to be wrong to get it right. We have to test ideas that defy the common sense of trivial experience. We have to change between unconnected frameworks. Sometimes we have to rephrase the question to find a better answer.
When I teach creativity, I tell people two important things:
Creativity is not an innate ability. It can be trained, even by people with the misfortune of having become grown-ups.
You have to challenge yourself.
Example: we will make a cover for a guidebook to Italy. It has to signal “Italy” even from a distance, and it has to stand out from the other guidebook covers.
I ask the participants to tell me the ten most iconic images of Italy, and put them on the whiteboard.
Then I tell them they can not use these images.
Half an hour later they present something that is creative.
And – most importantly – they perceive themselves as creative.
To write a good joke you have to test 30 ideas that don’t work. While brainstorming you have to remove all boundaries (suicide, pedophile, racist…), and once you come up with a sufficiently absurd point, you can reintroduce the boundaries, and make it even funnier as a hint, instead of a direct phrasing.
To create a new invention you also have to test 30 – or 300 – ideas that don’t work. While brainstorming you have to remove all boundaries (gravity, wind resistance, energy limitations, traffic laws, lack of funding…), and once you come up with a brilliant idea, and reintroduce the boundaries, you may not have invented a hovering car, but a completely novel idea for a space craft. Or a washing machine…
To be creative – and to evolve – you have to be childish, defiant, unconstraint, and challenge yourself.
And most of all you have to be wrong. Or set a squirrel on fire.