February 15, 2008: The Lesson? Never Try.

I walked past a motivational poster today.

There are only two ways to fail: not trying and giving up.

I think this poster ignores one other significant source of failure: plain ol' fuckin' around.

You know know what I'm talking about: those half-assed shrugging efforts of uninvolved people "giving it a shot" or "doing what they can" or "gettin' r' done" with limited knowledge or imagination.

"Trying" implies doing something, discovering you can't do it, and then giving up. It isn't "trying" if you keep at it until you succeed.

My own motivational poster would read:

Don't just try things: do them. If you can't, just sit quietly and don't do anything, okay?

Somehow the idea has entered our culture that intelligence is an additive function, as though the more people we have thinking about something, the better it will be.

We've come to the point when we literally believe the old saw that a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters can reproduce Shakespeare.

The trouble, of course, is that this is just a statistical commonplace. We don't need all of the monkeys. 999,999 of them are assholes, there as statistical filler for the one freakish Supermonkey who actually writes the Shakespeare.

In the modern workplace, those asshole monkeys--often well-intentioned--are usually jamming bananas and feces into the Supermonkey's typewriter, thereby slowing his or her progress.

Now I'm not claiming to be the Supermonkey all the time. Nobody can be. Anybody can be the Supermonkey OR the asshole monkey at different times and places, depending upon our talents and skills.

But I do know when I'm decidedly NOT the Supermonkey, and I have the courage to quietly fold my hands and keep my bananas to myself so the Supermonkey can work. Maybe I can work on being the Supermonkey on my own time as long as I'm not inhibiting the one who IS working.

The trouble with our "Yay! When we try, everybody wins!" philosophy is that sometimes those efforts get in the way of the people who actually care and have a shot at really getting it done.

So maybe the poster should say: If you're not the Supermonkey today, maybe you will be tomorrow. In the meantime, please keep your feces to yourself. Thank you.

Posted by Will Ludwigsen on February 15, 2008 11:09 AM | Permalink