Musician Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies are like a Tarot card deck full of whimsical ideas meant to break up a creative-block situation, particularly in the recording studio. They’re loads of fun to pick one at random and actually try to follow the advice, as intended, but some of them are just plain good advice for creatives.
One that keeps haunting me is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”, which basically boils down to taking a “mistake” and seeing where it leads you if you had meant to do it. I was just now putting the finishing touches on this week’s Hackaday Podcast, and noticed that we have been honoring a mistake for the past 350-something shows. Here’s how it happened.
When Mike and I recorded the first-ever podcast, I had no idea how to go about doing it. But I grew up in Nashville, and know my way around the inside of a music studio, and I’ve also got more 1990s-era music equipment than I probably need. So rather than do the reasonable thing, like edit the recording on the computer, we recorded to an archaic Roland VS-880 “Digital Studio” which is basically the glorified descendant of those old four-track cassette Portastudios.
If you edit audio in hardware, you can’t really see what you’re doing – you have to listen to it. And so, when I failed to notice that Mike and I were saying “OK, are you ready?” and “Sure, let’s go!”, it got mixed in with the lead-in music before we started the show off for real. But somehow, we said it exactly in time with the music, and it actually sounded good. So we had a short laugh about it and kept it.
And that’s why, eight years later, we toss random snippets of conversations into the intro music to spice it up. It was a mistake that worked. Had we been editing on the computer, we would have noticed the extra audio and erased it with a swift click of the mouse, but because we had to go back and listen to it, we invented a new tradition. Honor thy error indeed.
great story
(I’m a fan of Brian Eno, and Oblique Strategies)
One “mistake” story I love is that in The Police recording of Roxanne, Sting accidently sits on the keys of an upright piano, then laughs. Both that “chord” and the laugh were left in.
Didn’t know that Roxanne trivia. Thx!
I love this topic because it’s closely related to one of my favourite brainstorming strategies.
I remember as a child reading a story in Reader’s Digest about brainstorming sessions where off-the-wall thoughts were encouraged and saying that ideas were stupid was forbidden.
The problem to be solved was finding a replacement for the expensive aluminum sheathes that were used to protect explosive charges being delivered down the bore holes of wells. The session wasn’t going well, and someone said in frustration “let’s just stick it in a paper bag”. That led directly to the idea of using tubes made of tightly-rolled paper-and-adhesive tubes which cost a small fraction of the aluminum tubes.
And from that day, any time I’m in a group where ideas and solutions are being kicked around, I come down hard on anyone who ridicules any idea presented. Fear of mistakes and fear of looking stupid are enemies of both creativity and serendipity.
Quite usable strategy widely used everywhere where there are no micro/pico/femto/nanomanagers (or those kinds’ “valuable input” is kept to its sane limit, ie, ignored).
I’m so busy honoring I never get anything done.
In that case, user name checks out! It seems to be a commentary on something, sarcastic or ironic, but maybe it was just a goof? Perhaps an honored descendant of a goof? It just occurred to me that I am, most likely, descendant of a goof! Honor thy goofs, for thou is surely the result of many “goofs” going back through time. -I’m going to make a religion out of this, for sure.
This.
So many of my best sentences/paragraphs/publications start as typos or gifts from the great beyond between my ears (“Where did THAT come from?”). The trick is learning to run with them, then re-arranging your work to make it better, then editing the not-better stuff out to make the better more clear. (For some reasons my paragraphs are always in the wrong order – at first.)
As Laura Kampf says, “every defect gets respect.”
The not-arrogant version of “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”, aka “I meant to do that” =))
It seems that I reported this post by mistake while scrolling on the phone. My appologies.
My 5 cents to this subject is that saying that everybody knows that something cannot be done, until someone that does not know it does it.
Myself discovered another “fact”: if you can’t put A into/trough B, try putting B into/through A.
We should never grow old in wandering why that thing works, and why it won’t work another way, or looking at the stars, sometimes reflected in the eyes of the loved one.
Some of us are more hands on, doing the stuff without trying something new, going the known way. Some of us are trying to make planes out of cardboard and empty beer cans. The most important thing is to have a leader to choose a main solution to be worked by those that are hand on, and let the dreamers use some resources to test their ideas.
It seems that I put more than 5 cents here. Cheers.
wandering/wondering Well done! It is a nice example of a minor error that boosts serendipity.
Best regards!
Daniel F. Larrosa
Montevideo – Uruguay