Making mistakes is vital to creativity…so long as the mistake isn’t fatal

Creativity as rebellion

NPR ran an interesting piece on Philippe Petit, the guy who made his name by walking illegally by tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

He sounds like an amazing guy. He’s just written a book on creativity. He’s also a self-described loather of such books. His is different, though, because he wants to spur risk-taking. The book is titled “Creativity, the Perfect Crime”. Its focus on creativity as a kind of transgressiveness is refreshing. 

Philippe Petit: creative rebel

Real creativity has to be rebellious. "My journey has always been the balance between chaos and order.”

Surfing the wave

Charlie Munger loves the microeconomic mental model 'surfing'

One of Charlie Munger’s favored mental models comes from microeconomics.

Foreshadowing Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation,[i] Munger writes about the process of ‘competitive destruction’ that occurs in societies marked by rapid technological change. “You know, you have the finest buggy whip factory and all of a sudden in comes this little horseless carriage. And before too many years go by, your buggy whip business is dead. You either get into a different business or you're dead—you're destroyed. It happens again and again and again.

And when these new businesses come in, there are huge advantages for the early birds. And when you're an early bird, there's a model that I call ‘surfing’—when a surfer gets up and catches the wave and just stays there, he can go a long, long time. But if he gets off the wave, he becomes mired in shallows....”

Christensen’s take: "Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."

Those familiar with Munger’s thought are well acquainted with this idea and Munger’s take on how it operates and why it’s such a powerful model.

Petit and parkour

Petit’s case provides a very interesting example.

There’s a point in the interview when NPR’s Arun Rath asks incredulously about his longstanding interest and participation in parkour—the practice of moving through one’s environment as efficiently as possible while using only the human body (and regular clothes). Parkour artists try to use as much momentum as possible while safely navigating the obstacles their (often urban) environments present them.

Petit mentions that he got involved early on in the movement, which flourished in France several decades ago. Speaking “I have been performing in the street for more than 50 years: magic for basically 60 years, and the high wire 45 years. The beauty of it is that it's never the same. It's never easy. And yet, part of my art is to make it look easy.”

There’s a pay off for the hidden difficulty: it’s much of what observers find joy in. “Any activity such as parkour, such as wire-walking, any art that will rejoice in rebellious freedom,” Petit said, “is something that is going to enrich our lives.”

Parkour and fatal mistakes

Parkour wasn’t a huge mainstream phenomenon in the United States until recently. In fact, I’d guess few had heard of the activity before this famous scene in Daniel Craig ‘s debut as James Bond in “Casino Royale”.

When Casino Royale opened in 2006, “The Bourne Supremacy” had already made use of the shaky camera or ‘free camera’ technique[ii]. The movie made quite a splash with an opening scene that was more kinetic than probably any scene in the entire film’s history. No less an authority than Roger Moore calls Daniel Craig the best Bond ever, largely on the basis of that striking first impression. Moore said, “Yes, I thought Casino Royale was tremendous. I thought his action was quite extraordinary—he did more action in the first 30 seconds of the film than I did in 14 years of playing Bond. To me, he looks like a killer. He looks as though he knows what he’s doing. I look as though I might cheat at backgammon.”

Of course, in the film, there’s not much that can go wrong. But doing parkour in real life can be dangerous. It’s one thing to rebel, but the kind of rejoiceful celebration Petit is after is probably only possible when the stakes are high. If he had set a wire between a couple friends’ apartments two stories high in a Parisian suburb, he likely wouldn’t be as famous as he is today. Making a mistake on that tightrope at that altitude is fatal. Making some kinds of mistakes in parkour can be seriously dangerous, if not fatal. Certainly, were someone to attempt Daniel Craig’s Bond’s variety of parkour and make a mistake, it would be fatal.

Fatal mistakes from Politics...

Elie Kedourie in his book “Nationalism” treats nationalism as an ideology that tries to specify conduct according to a rote formula. It’s what Oakeshott calls ‘rationalism’ and is a pernicious example of what he calls ignoratio elenchi. It’s also a terrible side-effect of what Charlie Munger refers to as intense ideology. In the the book’s second edition, Kedourie responds to some reviewers, who leveled the complaint against him that he didn't "attempt to discuss whether nationalists should be conciliated or resisted." 

One of my former professors mentioned to me that an honest response from Kedourie would have been to take them out and shoot them, he instead argued in ‘his most archly Oakshottian manner’ writing, "A decision on such an issue is necessarily governed by the particular circumstances of each individual case, and whether its consequences are fortunate or disastrous will depend on the courage, shrewdness and luck of those who have the power to take it.  For an academic to offer his advice on this matter is, literally, impertinent:  academics are not diviners, and it is only at dusk, Hegel said, that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings." Kedourie took Hegel to mean that a culture's philosophical understanding reaches its peak only when the culture enters its decline.
 
During his or her time in office, about the best a politician might hope for is to act, intra vires, to help bring about less homophobic policies, or at least to act as foil against the most homophobic proposals of his rivals. Considering the political context in which people actually operate, though, whatever a politician might do is likely to be best done indirectly and subtly. Ignoratio elenchi in those lines of work can sometimes be fatal; no matter how nimble a politician or parkour artist, to act too directly in these endeavors is likely to render the participant unfit and unable to keep performing them.

Kedourie has it about right when he says that political action depends on "the courage, shrewdness, and luck" of the decision-takers.  I suspect even Richard Flathman would agree (ruefully) that an elected official should think long and hard before deciding to be "free-spirited."

And Investing

Whitney Tilson attended a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting near the turn of the century and returned telling amazing and humorous stories about the goings-on. Charlie Munger offered a wonderful example of how one can commit a fatal mistake in investing by trying to tackle a problem their ill equipped to handle. "We don't consider [Warren Buffet's and Charlie Munger's company Berkshire Hathaway] in remotely the same business as Tiger and Quantum [both of which recently announced that they are closing down]. They are mostly buying and selling securities. We're structured poorly from a tax standpoint to own securities." (Corporations like Berkshire Hathaway pay a 35% tax rate on capital gains compared to 20% on long-term gains realized by private investment partnerships like Tiger and Quantum.) Munger added, "Soros couldn't bear to see others make money in the technology sector without him, and he got killed. It doesn't bother us at all [that others are making money in the tech sector]."

At the same meeting, Munger said, "When you mix raisins and turds, you've still got turds." He was talking about the benefits that the Internet and technology (raisins) provide to society compared to the evils of stock speculation (turds), but he may well have been talking about the person who knows lots of great stuff (raisins) but who also acts in areas where he doesn't know much of anything (turds).

A prime example of this phenomenon is the economists who "shared a Nobel Prize…went into money management himself...and sank like a stone.” Or former Harvard president Larry Summers, a remarkably intelligent guy by nearly any criteria, but one who erred significantly by investing Harvard’s cash account alongside its endowment, thereby exposing the university to a pretty massive liquidity risk. Summers mixed raisins with turds and and both he and the university paid a steep price.

Embracing Mistakes…so long as they don’t kill you

One of the primary benefits to Petit’s approach is that it allows for a healthy relationship with failure. Munger points to –even more radically looking to seek out and destroy his own best and most successful ideas.

Petit expresses a very similar sentiment, “I have discovered the my best teachers were my mistakes, and instead of covering a mistake with a list of excuses, I actually unwrap the mistake and I look at it and approach it, and I see why ... it's my fault, and that's how I'm going to learn. So, I love mistakes.”

So do I. It’s important to keep in mind, though, regardless of our pursuits the mistakes that can be fatal. Can't say I'm interested in making that kind of mistake.

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[i] Munger’s example comes from his 1994 talk “A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business” given to the USC Business School. Of course, Munger didn’t invent the idea either. Economist Joseph Schumpeter adapted a similar concept that Karl Marx had previously identified. Christensen first used the now ubiquitous phrase in his 1995 piece (co-authored with Joseph L. Bower) "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" in the Harvard Business Review.

[ii] Shaky camera is a technique often associated with a ‘cinéma vérité’ style, but I don’t think that director Paul Greengrass and cinematographer Oliver Wood cared to produce a film the had a high degree of verisimilitude with any reality with which any of us are familiar. John Cassavetes was prominent in ushering in a hand-held camera revival to feature filmmaking in the 1970s, and I imagine Greengrass had his brand of stylized grittiness rather than a documentary approach—despite the fact that Greengrass does documentary work.