playing chess

Good Mistakes

March 12, 2005
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    The root of creativity is the idea… Generating new ideas is really my problem, I always get this feeling of copying others work but I oftenly feel that’s not in my track… I’m getting stuck sometimes and don’t know where to start and produce ideas that would somehow incorporate new style.

    I didn’t know that good mistakes could also lead into creativity.

    Jolo / 14/03/2005

    …or as we used to call them when I was at art college ‘happy accidents’.

    I’m sure loads of ground breaking creative endevours have been the result of these “good mistakes” somewhere along the line.

    I think the power comes in when one is humble enough to accept ones mistakes, then learn from and use them.

    JT / 14/03/2005

    “Taniyama was sloppy to the point of laziness”

    my kinda guy!

    jake / 14/03/2005

    this would explain why jake admires me so much *cough*

    Phil Sherry / 16/03/2005

    I loved that book, Fermat’s Last Theorem is a great piece of mathematical history. I didn’t catch that point in the book, but going along with JT’s comment, I’ve often thought how interestingly some of science’s greatest acheivements have come about. Nice find.

    clay / 17/03/2005

    Having recently read Fermats Last Theorem by Simon Singh, one particular paragraph stayed with me.

    Goro Shimura and Yutaka Taniyama were 2 talented mathematicians at the University of Tokyo back in 1954. But the two had very different methods of working. To quote from the book:

    While Shimura was fastidious, Taniyama was sloppy to the point of laziness. Surpisingly this was a trait that Shimura admired: ‘He was gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction. I envied him for this and tried in vain to imitate him, but found it quite difficult to make good mistakes.’

    Good mistakes. I’ve always been a fan of mistakes in creativity and when trying to generate ideas, which is nothing new. But I love the idea of “good mistakes”. The two together seem at first to contradict each other but actually are a powerful notion - maybe that’s the basis of all creative ideas?

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