By Steve Spalding August 25th, 2009
http://howtosplitanatom.com/
Stupidity can look a whole lot like creativity. In fact, one of the risks of being incredibly creative is that you will spend the vast majority of your life being unbelievably stupid. To understand why, let’s look at the cycle of stupidity and how it works.
All stupidity starts with a thought, an idea, something you feel will make the world better and effect the people you deem worthy of your consideration. Whether it’s a startup, a work of art, a novel or a political philosophy, stupidity, despite popular belief, is a function of thought.
The greater the number of thoughts you have (creative people think a lot), the greater your chance that some of them will be ridiculously ham fisted.
The big caveat is that no matter how silly a thought is, that doesn’t make it stupid in and of itself. Creative people need to allow themselves to have “stupid” thoughts. If they don’t, they would never come up with anything interesting.
Where the cycle really starts to take on a life of its own is when ego starts to come into play. Ego says that your thoughts are right and no matter what information is out there to prove you wrong, that does not take away from the fact that your thoughts are right. Worse than that, the more likely it is that you might be wrong the more forcefully your ego will make you crusade to prove that you’re right.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias. It’s the tendency to accept only things that confirm your hypothesis as true and deny everything else as being either inaccurate or skewed.
Creativity requires a certain amount of ego. Creative people often have monumental egos and we love them for it. If you are doing anything interesting, people will disagree with you. The more interesting the thing you are trying is, the more likely people are to disagree. If you cant stick to your guns and trust your vision, you can’t hope to do anything when faced with dissent.
A much bigger problem is when ego goes chronic it turns into stubbornness. Unlike ego which seeks to maintain your vision when faced with dissent (much of which could be false), stubbornness is continuing to do something in the face of increasingly clear proof that it isn’t working. It’s spending $5 million in investment capital to prove that you can’t make money on your business model, not changing a word of it and asking for $5 million more to keep trying or sticking with a political philosophy because it’s your political philosophy, even if the facts don’t match up on a particular issue.
This is where creativity and stupidity start to come into their own. Strongly creative people realize they need to change and adapt, that while they are “right” in a broad sense, they might not have all the details straight. When people are being stupid, it’s usually because they can’t see that any part of their idea could be flawed. In fact, they are more willing to run their idea into the ground than to change the handful of details that might save it. They start to love the idea of being correct more than they love their idea.
This inexorably leads back to thought, now seen less through the lens of making the world better or effecting the people you care about, and more through the stubborn refusal to be wrong regardless of the outcome.
Staying on the right side of creativity and stupidity is a matter of balance. Face it, we spend a lot of time being stupid. If you are trying a bunch of different ideas on for size, you might spend more time than most on the wrong side of the line. The point is to recognize when your crossing over and do your best to keep some perspective. To balance vision with the ability to be wrong. To understand when you need to and stick to your guns and when it’s time to change.
To be willing to be a little stupid but not to let it get in the way of changing the world.
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