What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? – NYTimes.com.

Moose and his Driver have been on the road a lot, with lots of quiet time with which to think, and listen– sometimes to seemingly nothing at all, and one of the thing’s The Driver has come to understand, which Moose, just by his virtue of being a moose, already knew, was that when you listen to other’s talk or sing on the radio, or watch T.V., or read a book or magazine, or play video games, you give up a part, if not all, in the case of T.V., of your own creative consciousness, for the time you are engaged in that activity.

Now that isn’t all bad.  Think ice cream, which Moose does all the time.  Ice cream is great!  But not all the time.  Same for Pizza.  You get the point.  One needs time to think about that next ice cream.  Work towards it, emotionally, physically– burning off the last ice cream, for instance.

The Driver was reminded of this the other day when building shelves out of a half dozen bundles of eight foot 1″x3″ pine boards.  More importantly, the scraps created when cutting forty-eight of these boards.

To me, I could come up with any number of uses for them, from kindling, to spacers for another shelf.  But to one of Moose’s main peeps, The Driver’s seven year old son, the scraps were unquestionably The Titanic Two, TT, for short– seen on the two smoke stacks of the model, (for those of you really looking for a really deep reference, also Taggart Transportation), and an accompanying dock.

The point is, when you’re seven, you’re always thinking outside “the box”, everything is a stream of consciousness moment of creativity.  The only difficulty a seven year old has is getting a parent, other adult, or sibling to indulge their innate curiosity to it’s fully formed end.  No small task for a seven year old in this harried day and age.

It happened that this day The Driver, father of said seven year old, Rocket Boy we’ll call him, because he’s always racing to his next idea, did have the time, and chop saw at hand, with glue and screws handy, to help Rocket Boy realize his vision.  The design of the boat, dock, and coloring, were entirely directed, and in the case of the coloring, executed by him.

The article in today’s New York Times sort of coalesced all this for me, and illuminated one of my favorite thoughts from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, that it’s not what you learn when the slot-head screw holding the crankcase cover comes out cleanly and easily, but how you react, and then possibly learn from, it being stuck, and you agree with yourself to figure out how get it unstuck.  It’s in the “sticky” moments of life, and learning, where the greatest pure original knowledge, is built.

This is all a lot for a Moose and his Driver to contemplate, but the results of the “Sticky” moment for The Driver of what to do with a pile of scraps, and the creative prodding of a seven year old Rocket Boy, which ultimately manifested themselves into the stunning accomplisment of the Titanic Two, have spurred Moose and his Driver to find more of these opportunities to share not just with Rocket Boy, but with the audience at large.

We’ll see where it takes us.

{ 0 comments }