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Not Knowing

We learn by experience. Ready-made answers don’t work. If we find one that sounds good, we can try it.

When we do, then we learn. Maybe we try many different things (nature does), and they don’t work out the way we hoped. But we have still learned. And we can always try looking beyond what we hoped.

Like the guy at 3M trying to make a super-strong glue who ended up with a super-weak one, it wasn’t what he hoped. The opposite of what he intended. That glue became the basis for the Post-It note.

In that story-with-a-happy-ending, there’s a magical ingredient: not knowing. The experimenter did not go to war with himself for not getting a defined outcome. And (hats off to 3M’s innovation culture), no one went to war with him.

But someone said, “I don’t know what use that could be”, which started a train of thoughts and events that ended with the Post-It.

Being comfortable with unexpected outcomes of what we try means we can be open to examining them and asking, “What can we get from the outcome? How might it be used?” rather than from the viewpoint that the desired outcome did not happen.

Maybe there won’t be any immediately apparent value. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that when we accept not knowing, we don’t waste energy punishing ourselves for it. We use that energy to investigate, explore, and learn more. In this sense, there is no failure.

So here is to new experiments with no such thing as failure.