I WANT To Make Mistakes

So the last month has been a little crazy for me. I've just been in this weird funk after my first script reading. I just felt lost afterwards. I didn't really feel I was getting much guidance for the movie. Same for work. I felt like I was wandering in the woods. And it didn't really hit me at how lost I was until this past week.

So this past week we had a leadership training workshop on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Even if you haven't read the book, you've probably heard of some of the habits: "Be Proactive" and "Seek To Understand, and Then To Be Understood." I found it amusing how the mini-movies exotified non-White cultures, like Native Americans, Africans, and Asians, and of course all the White folks seemed to just nod their heads. But anyway, being the former UCLA student advocate that I was, I did what came naturally, I questioned. In particular, I questioned whether the company truly fostered an environment where the 7 Habits could be exercised. So I brought up the questions like a good heymaker should, and the trainer responded right back to a question back at me: "Well, what have YOU done to change yourself? Because you can't change your environment unless you embody the change yourself."

My first thought was "leave it to corporate America to take a quote of a Civil Rights Leader to reinforce the status quo." Second, I wondered whether it really was me, or if it really was the company, or just both. I'll admit that my own pride does get in the way of a lot of things, and my first instinct is to alter the environment to my desires. But third, and most profoundly, I asked myself if I was really being true to my movie project. I whined about how I didn't feel supported about this movie project; was it because people saw that, deep down inside, that I wasn't giving it my all? Did they see that I was clinging on to other safety measures, like my job and my current circle of relationships, and that just maybe I was too scared to do what was necessary to see this movie through? Did others see that I just didn't believe in myself, or in them, as much as I should have?

I realized that I was confronting my perfectionist tendencies head-on. A conditioning groomed since as long as I can remember. A belief that something wasn't worth doing unless it was done perfectly. An assumption that I shouldn't get involved in anything unless I could be the very best at it. A fear in making any mistakes.

But after some reading and reflection, I realized that in order for that philosophy to hold, I had to make two assumptions: #1 I knew what perfection was, and #2 I knew what a mistake was. Did I really understand what a perfect movie was? Or a perfect high school or college career? Or a perfect lifestyle? Probably not. And did I know what truly made a mistake? Were the actions that I thought were mistakes really mistakes? Many of humanity's greatest works were created from "mistakes". Penicillin was discovered when a Petri dish was accidentally contaminated with fungi. Chocolate chip cookies were invented when Ruth Graves Wakefield ran out of baker's chocolate for her chocolate cookies, and instead replaced it with semi-sweet chocolate, hoping the chocolate would melt into the batter. Maybe all internal checks and balances that were meant to protect me were the very structures that prevented me from discovering new ways to think and live.

One last epiphany comes from a book I just finished reading by Ricardo Semler called "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works". The book charts how his company Semco has implemented a structure of workplace democracy where workers are allowed to set their own hours, define their own job responsibilities, set their own wages, select and fire employees, and basically have access to any and all information regarding the organization. You can imagine that such an environment would create such chaos, and to some extent it has. Semler literally has no idea of the direction that his company is going, and his ideas can just as easily be voted down as anyone else's. Neither is Semco impervious to mistakes, and Semco's employees make plenty. But because Semco is structured so that the employee's self-interest is directly tied to the company's performance, and that the employees have all the tools available to shape Semco's performance, there is enough flexibility within the organization so that hazardous "mistakes" are not fatal, and creative "mistakes" are opportunities for growth. Which poses the question what is better: making numerous mistakes which are constantly and consciously addressed, or following one idea you take for granted because a superior told you so, only to find that it's a mistake several years down the road?

So it's in that spirit, with the knowledge that changing a behavior is far more challenging than changing knowledge or a belief, that I pray for the strength and courage to make MANY mistakes, and an open mind to navigate me through the chaos, in order to travel a path I could never have dreamed possible.