From Error, Virtue

I do a lot of making of random things, as a hobby. I am not particularly coordinated or skilled, so I make a lot of small mistakes. I also work with unusual materials or ideas. For example, this weekend, I took some very old redwood that had been discarded from a logging operation 100 years ago (so it’s probably old growth, but it’s been sitting on the floor of a forest all that time. It’s pretty, but delicate) and made a box out of some of it. But I somehow misaligned the cut - hard to know how since the entire thing is symmetrical - so that there was an even offset to the lid on both sides. It still fit, but the grain didn’t align.

So I took some nice Washi paper and covered just the small part of the misaligned grain, and then added some of the paper to the inside of the box and bottom of the lid. Not at all the design I started out with, but a really cool design at the end of the process.

One way to describe life is “4B years of mistakes”. It’s pretty accurate - the “goal” of reproduction is to reproduce, but sometimes there are mistakes in that process. Many of them are bad, and they die out. But some are more fit, and they thrive.

This is true in music too. If you are jamming, and you play a “wrong” note, it sounds bad. If you stop, it’s worse - but if you use it as a “passing tone” to a better note, it can sound great. The blues notes, and those great bluegrass slides are “wrong” notes used the right way. As the saying goes, “you’re never more than a half step from salvation”.

One more story - this is common in science too. Stainless steel was discovered because an assistant put 1000x times as much chromium as was called for into an experimental alloy. A few months later, they noticed that ingot, shiny in the rusted pile of rejects. There are many other stories of “mistakes” leading to insight.

I’ve decided this pattern needs to be called out and celebrated, and I’ve decided to call it “From Error, Virtue”. I made a crest for it using DALL-E, and of course, the text is in error, which to me makes it that much better:

We talk a lot about cheap experiments, being willing to fail, things like that around here. We all try things that don’t work and make mistakes even when we have the right idea. This can be your raw material for great things, if you are flexible and aware. Keep your eyes open - there is virtue in error.