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With an Eye to Profundity
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Forget all the trite little sayings about the advantages of being profound. If they were really that profound, they’d sink in and make major differences in your life beyond the initial little spasm of mental activity that accompanies them when you first hear them.
What the hell am I talking about?
[blub blub, pours more Scotch]
What I have in mind are sayings like “think outside the box,” “keep an open mind,” and “waste not want not.”
Actually, the last one has nothing at all to do with what I’m writing about. (I stole that joke from Paul)
No but really. Thinking outside the box is great! Yeah! We’ve been saved!
“So hey guys! You have any ideas yet?”
“Guys?”
Why profundity is your last, best hope
Ok it’s not your last hope, you could, after all, find a bag o’ cash floating in the ocean. Barring that (and assuming you would even dare keep such a heinous artifact), it is your best hope. Remember follow the follower? We’re not always very imaginative creatures, you know? Of course, this makes perfect sense. The guy who tried to cross the gorge by leaping because he thought it was the creative solution when every other gorge required a bridge to be built first sent us down the path of Forever Cautious.
You go first.
The simple answer? Distinguish utterly stupid from profound. Profound ideas don’t have to result in death or bankruptcy. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that because some profound things have turned out badly (ok, a lot of them have), we develop a resistance to all things profound. (Also, see skepticism below).
But the scary bastard of the truth here is that looking where everyone else has been looking is going to lead to solutions that won’t make any real progress.
Think how profound this was. Fabulous idea. Can it be repeated? Um, not so much. Seriously people, stop it. So some profound ideas work great, repeating them can be tough, and some are just really bad in the first place.
In the end, the big lesson is this: big gains in life come from big ideas. The defining projects of the great achievers that catapulted them to the status of idols were always in some way remarkably profound, but coming up with profound ideas about where to go in life isn’t a very natural thing to do. What you usually end up doing is checking in on your friends to see what they’ve been up to. This is a great start, because it gets you going, it lets you see things you might not see on your own, but eventually, you’ve got to be the one who squeezes the Meisterwerk out of you. You’ve got to do the profound.
Taking your thinking out of the domain of normalhood and into profound territory isn’t as easy as the phrases that say you should are to say, and here’s why:
We people-things like sturdy things
We want conviction damn it! We’re the people who build steel skyscrapers for crying out loud. Skyscrapers! You see? Don’t you see the profundity in that?
No really, we like solid, sturdy things. But that tendency for solidness is a trap for any of us who want to escape the sturdy, boring, uninteresting lives. What is it that we do? We get an inkling about where we want to go, then we go looking for role models. When we find them, we try to replicate. There’s a wonderful sense of solidness in knowing your treading on ground that actually led someone else to the place you want to go.
“How do I know this bridge will take me? Because it took that guy!”
We’re almost all skeptics at some level
And boy has skepticism done wonders for us. “Hi there scary snake! What nice fangs you have there!” The early Homo Sapien drunk beer buddy who watched his friend writhe on the ground with two small holes on his forearm could have been the very first skeptic, you never know. Hence the phrase, “like hell” was born.
But at the root of skepticism lies the obstacle that defines it: failure. It’s easy and truthful to acknowledge that most things in the world just don’t work. In order to avoid coming up with ideas that will fail, the easiest way is to just never come up with any ideas. In fact, let me tell you how to be completely perfect:
Don’t ever do anything.
That way, your skepticism will always be justified. That way, nothing you will ever try to do will ever fail. In fact, here’s a cool little homework project. Do what I just said to do for an entire life, and the whole while be fully skeptical that doing anything unordinary will succeed. Then, at the end of a life, let me know how many things you did resulted in the failure that your skepticism said you would fail at.
Dream baby, dream!
Dream! Fill your head with an endless supply of ridiculous, nonsensical ideas. Like that dream I had where my wife was upset because, for whatever reason, she insisted on using cheap damp toilet paper to clean carpets. Do you have any idea how this helped us with chores? Do you? Ok, it was a disaster.
You have to cast out to un-fished territory. You have dream of endless and crazy ideas. Massage them, make them rational, turn them into pragmatic ideas. Work with them until they become something meaningful and useful. Start with wild initiatives and employ them as fringe utilities.
With an eye to profundity
But the biggest problem with not so profound sayings on how to be profound is that we rarely really own the ideas. Profundity is an idea outside of ourselves. We’re never really in the box we’re told to think outside of. It’s an abstraction. It’s a thing over there. It’s a tool we never use in a drawer we never open. We want someone else to be profound for us.
Do you own it?
I mean, do you really own it? Is profound thinking the hidden unused tool in the shed, or is like your wristwatch on your, …wrist? Is the thought of new idea generation your constant companion wherever you go? Is it a part of your character? Is coming up with ideas the way people you know would define you, if given the chance?
Give them the chance.
Wrack your brain. Press the limits of your imagination. Make thinking about new ways to old problems an obsession, of sorts. Make it the first and last thing you think about each day. “What else can I try? That didn’t work, well how about this? Ok that was silly, but what about this?”
Do you always have an eye to the profound?
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Dereck :: Sep.04.2008 :: Growth, Perspectives :: 10 Comments »
10 Responses to “With an Eye to Profundity”
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Before I started writing, I thought ideas were limited. I realize now, that is ridiculous. Imagination is endless, so long as you feed it.
Great post. Looking for profundity and finding it are two different things. Unfortunately my muse stopped returning my phone calls sometime around 1998.
“Thinking outside the box is great! Yeah! We’ve been saved!”
LOL, Derek. Ok, all I meant was that we get stuck in thinking that things have to be a certain way. You are trying to do the bicycle trip all while not changing much else in your life. It’s basically your current life – job + bicycle trip = new life.
Before you can ‘think outside the box’, you have to identify your box. What are your assumptions about the way you want to live? The things you don’t even think to question?
Once you’ve figured that out, you can look at whether all or none of those assumptions is valid. Believe me, Derek, I didn’t mean “Where’s the box?” in a trite way.
I am quitting my job in two weeks and I REALLY want something different. But I have to identify my box first.
@ Writer Dad – I like that.
@ Paul – Me thinks we need to resurrect that.
@ Hayden – It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that you were referring to the e-mail exchange regarding my postponement of the bike trip. Wow. I’m slow.
Hey, that never even crossed my mind when I wrote this. Now I feel bad, like maybe you thought I was insulting your advice about finding “the box” out of which I ought to begin to think so I can get going on the trip again.
How careless of me. Your advice was both sound and completely appreciated. I was sitting on the patio of a local Starbucks the other day, trying to think of the conventional ways people tell themselves to be imaginative, when in fact they often are not. Then the phrase, “Think outside the box” popped in my head and I ran with it.
It didn’t cross my mind that you might think I was pointing to a deficiency in our conversation on the side. But really, I think you’re completely right.
LOL, now you’re my Seth Godin and I completely misread the post! Good times.
I read this great post and then went and read the comments which I NEVER do until I write my own comment as I like to do it free of influence. Just my way….I like to find my own path and see what will come out of me of its own accord.
ANYWAY, I read your’s and Hayden’s discourse and laughed and enjoyed THAT as much as the post itself.
THEN out of nowhere an unbidden thought went through my head: “There is no box. That’s an illusion. We need only realize that we are already without limits.”
Now, I wasn’t even planning on writing THAT, but once it went through my head I had to jot it down…..somewhere LOL and since I was HERE…you became my somewhere to jot it down.
What I WAS going to write was the I love the discourse between you and Hayden. It was delightful and I felt happy to see how you both handled it. It totally warmed my heart!!
So there you have it!! A very off beat comment.
Thanks for making me laugh, smile and rejoice! Hayden did too.
@ Hayden – Well, I wouldn’t say that you misread the post. I think you had some very good reasons to think i was referring to you directly. It was my bad.
@ Robin – Ah, but I like offbeat.