A friend asked me
"If you could offer a newborn
child only one piece of advice, what would it be?"
And I took it quite seriously, and gave
it some thought. (We have to follow the sense of the question –
even though we cannot communicate with a newborn, we can give him/her
a medallion with an inscription and explain it later.)
"Follow your dreams" was the
first saying that hit me. But what kind of advice is that? Sometimes
you should follow your dreams, and sometimes not. I have several
dreams I am glad that I didn't chase. So it doesn't really say
anything. Let us try something else,
"Appreciate what you have",
"Don't do unto others that which you do not want done unto you"
(the golden rule), "Search for your own happiness, not other
peoples unhappiness", "The meaning of life is to be happy
and useful". All of these are quite common, and you will hear
them several times, from all kinds of people (except the last one
from Ghandi – somehow people tend to forget it). But if I could
offer some advice, and only one thing, I would want it to be
something that most people don't know, and that they don't know that
they don't know. And it would also need to carry a lot of
information, unlike the "follow your dreams"-quote.
"Give
yourself and the world room to fail and be mistaken," is what I
ended up with. This originally comes from an understanding of what
limits the learning and intelligence of my students when they embark
on a university education. They often think that the goal is to be
right, that those who give correct answers are the smartest people.
So they keep their inquiries inside their sphere of knowledge, they
don't ask or answer questions where they might seem stupid, they show
the world how much they know, not how much they would like to learn.
If someone wins an argument by convincing the other party, that
person gains some measure of respect, or as I said, he
wins.
The feeling of changing your viewpoint (after being convinced) is a
crappy feeling of loss. But if you look at the outcome of the
dialogue, the "loosing" party learned ten times more than
those who won. The looser should be proclaimed the winner.
This
doesn't apply only when you loose the argument (you should loose with
gratitude), but also when you win an argument. People who are correct
and convincing often see themselves as all high and mighty, superior
to the other party. If you feel this, and let it shine through (for
example via body-language) you destroy much of the potential in
future dialogues, including your own potential for learning, and, of
course, you diminish the current outcome.
So
far we have only looked at what I mean by saying "Give yourself
and the world room to be mistaken." But what about the part with
"failing"? Why is it important to fail, and to give the
world an opportunity to disappoint you? If you always succeed at what
you do, or have a high rate of success, it is a sign that you are
working entirely within the box. If you only ever stretch your
comfort zone a tiny bit, adding just a grain of sand, the probability
of failure is small. To think outside the box is to allow for
failure, to be creative is to allow for poor results.
If
you never let the world disappoint you, you ask too little of it. If
you don't want to be denied a job, so you don't even apply for it,
you fall into this trap. If you never tell the people around you
about your dreams because they might laugh at you instead of helping
you, you do not give them the opportunity to disappoint you, and
neither do you give them the opportunity of helping you succeed.
