To Err is Human
Better to be wrong than boring.
As humans, we often berate ourselves over our mistakes and failures in life. A broken glass. A lost ticket. A missed opportunity. Collectively, we are on a never-ending quest for perfection, where any sign of human error is to be tweezed out, eliminated and stamped out into oblivion.
But to err is human. And in this current reign of technology, to continually err in every possible way is our only hope for resistance.
The future is already written on the wall. There is only one direction that the technology ramp is headed — up. Faster, smaller, cleaner, quieter. From cameras to computers, whatever specs a chip or machine has, it can be improved by 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x and so on.
But this trajectory of progress is boring and predictable. A series of minutiae improvements does not equate to innovation. It is merely a generic consumer product releasing yet another overhyped upgrade. True innovation skips generations — it is iPhone 4, with its front-facing camera igniting the domination of the selfie and iPhone 8, with wireless charging and no headphone jack ushering us into a world without wires. Anything in between is circle-jerking noise.
Fundamentally, errors tell us what is going wrong, and where to go next. So if you want to make a big leap in life, it is better to fail big first. You…
