On messing around

I’ve been in Japan this past week, meeting with companies here. We talk a lot about innovation and disruption. Japanese companies are very urgently focused on this, and sometimes struggle with it.

As I was speaking with these companies, more and more I realize that there is a particular mindset about innovation that I just take for granted: the happy mutant. This sounds like it might be an insult but I consider myself one, so I hope not. This refers to a person who is just happily curious and engaged with some corner of the world - “mutant” refers to the idea that their obsession makes sense to them but not to anyone else. They don’t care, whatever it is - collecting, creating, science, whatever - they “know” it’s interesting and just want to dig into it.

That’s always been the mindset I like, and the mindset of my best friends. I was a total happy mutant in school about math and science. I LOVE weird ideas like transfinite cardinality, the halting probability, the eerie weirdness of the completeness and correctness theorems, the mysteries of the continuum, and so on. You might also call this a growth mindset - the folks I liked to hang out with were just curious explorers, and they didn’t really need to know why - they just wanted to know.

I think that ability to explore something without having to know why - to just follow instinct - is incredibly critical to discovery and innovation. Things always look planned after the fact - like GDocs, which seems like a planned, obvious idea. But the reality is that it was just an exploration of some new tech, just some messing around.

I love the story of the invention of stainless steel. Absolutely critical invention that the modern world depends on, but when it was discovered, no one had any idea it could be done. A metallurgist was just “messing around” with alloys, trying to see what would happen - being a happy mutant exploring metal. His assistant screwed up (I love mistakes) and added 3000x as much chromium to an experiment as he was supposed to. They thought this was useless, tossed it on a pile of old ingots - and then noticed a few weeks later that it was still nice and shiny….

Mess! Mistakes! Exploring! This is where everything comes from. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know why you’re doing it - if something is interesting to you, do it with all you have!