How I Came to Love Why
From Zanecorpwiki
One of the most annoying questions for a creative mind is Why? How is it any different?, What's the unique value?, Isn't this just like that other thing that came out last year? They're all ways of saying Why bother?
It's a great question, but most creative people I know--myself included until very recently--hate it. It's frustrating that this thing one loves so dearly, a child of the mind, a creation, is not understood. Why the challenge when the beauty, to the creator, is so obvious?
Why exposes an ignorance that must be addressed. Sometimes that ignorance is within the viewer, and we must provide them with the experience and knowledge so they can understand. Often, though, the ignorance is within the creator who's love for this creation has blinded them to a flaw. In almost every case, it's a little of both.
The viewer's ignorance is not only understood, but necessary. When we talk about creations, we are talking about the new, and anything new is by definition unknown. Even the most basic ideas have to be learned.
The first reason to love why is because it shows you're might be on the right track. If no one's asking why, then that means they already understand it and it's nothing new.
Consider that when first introduced, the idea of the now ubiquitous computer desktop combining a mouse and a metaphor into a graphical windowing interface was dismissed entirely. Once understood, it's so clear and obvious that we cannot even remember what it was like to be ignorant. It gets to the point that we cannot imagine ignorance as having ever existed. This is the result of intuition, and it's a wonderful thing.
Yet, the failure of Xerox proves that ignorance is hard even when the knowledge seems quite natural. A company full of smart people doing the most brilliant software work of their day was unable to understand what the desktop that they created was. This makes it clear that ignorance always exists for everything new; even the most clever and clear metaphors.
Clearly, some people in Xerox got it. The problem was there was no one who could articulate what it was to those that didn't get it. We needed Jobs and Wozniak to combine marketing and a just so implementation of the ideas into something we could all get.
The second reason to love why is because it's so helpful. It tells us exactly what we need to do: we need to answer the question.
How do we do this? Understand the viewer's perspective. We don't communicate by understanding how we see things, but by understanding how the other person sees things. Don't be defensive. Forget about who's right. Everything is dumb from some perspective. A knife is good for cutting potatoes, but it's not so great from the perspective of a gun fight.
To some degree, we are all trapped by our perspective, and the only way to escape is to first realize this. It's hard not to be defensive because (God dammit!) we're usually right from our own perspective. But when we become defensive, we are like a castle under siege; we can only act from our own perspective. When the other person is also defensive--as is almost always the case--then it is like two forts, each buttoned down lobbing annoying but ultimately ineffective artillery, each unwilling to sally forth.
To meet on the ground of the other is to besiege their castle. This is difficult because by exiting our own position, we become vulnerable and accept that we may the loser in the contest. Before that point, there is actually no contest at all, just starvation and whithering on both sides.
The first step is to realize that only by accepting the possibility of defeat is victory possible.
Next comes revelation: if truth is the goal, then those that accept defeat will always be victorious, for what is defeated is not the other, nor yourself. It is only ignorance we defeat.
