Finding Joy In Errors
What I read: Allow error into your life and experience the joy of surprise by Leyla Loued-Khenissi. Published April 11, 2022.
Being a creature of habit and inherently risk-averse, sometimes I don’t take enough chances in life. I can spend weeks or even months not leaving a few square blocks radius around my apartment. I drink my coffee every morning at the same coffeeshop. I eat lunch at my favorite local eatery four or five times a week. Despite living in a city with many LGBTQ bar and event options, you’ll find me in the same two or three nightlife places most of the time.
There are numerous other examples I could give of my life being a series of me approaching the proverbial fork in the road and deciding to take the turn I’ve traveled down many times before.
Robert Frost wrote in his iconic poem,
Two roads diverged in a wood and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Frost was onto something. Perhaps the road less traveled should be our choice more often. Perhaps our lives would be better if we frequently rolled the dice and let chance transport us into a new experience.
That’s the gist of Leyla Loued-Khenissi’s beautiful article suggesting we all consider allowing some error into our lives to experience the joy of surprise. Stories abound of people doing just that and ending up in a magical place of unexpected transformation, the results often surprising the person who took the chance.
Avoiding error is built into our brains. We are wired to avoid uncertainty and to minimize error. Piled on top of our biological functions is a society that worships at the altar of correctness and frowns upon error. School children learn quickly that all errors are bad. Friends will chastise friends for taking chances that might end up badly but could just as well end up marvelously. Professional paths that deviate from the tried-and-true categories of work deemed acceptable are quickly countered by parents, family, friends, and society itself.
Moments of life such as these, strung along the thread of our timeline, teach us to change our thinking, our expectations, to align with the world out there. Less often and usually with less success, we might change the world to meet our expectations. Either way, from all this arises the prevailing view that mismatch and error are a bad thing, a crack in the sidewalk to avoid stepping on.
But isn’t the surprise outcome often the better one? When I left college my third semester to pursue a potential career as a dancer, almost everyone thought I was bonkers. I was tossing away 13 years of good grades and a stable, lucrative career. Everyone knew most male dancers were assumed to be gay and did I really want to broadcast my gayness more loudly? How would I pay the bills? Dancers inevitably age out of the profession and why would I pursue something that might only prove viable for a few more years.
I don’t know why I took that leap out of college and into two or three dance classes a day. Money was usually scarce. I bounced around jobs and gigs cobbling together enough cash to supplement my dance classes and eventually my dance career because dancers are rarely paid well, at least back in my day.
Never have I doubted my decision though. The error so many saw me committing before their eyes always seemed like a good idea to me. Fueled by a passion to move to music and the distaste that lingered inside me for my originally planned accountant and attorney future, I decided to embrace the error, embrace the unknown, and the few years I danced professionally were among the most joyous. No regret. Not even a little bit. I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having.
So, there was a case where I jumped feet first into an error, the ostensibly less than optimal decision, and it turned out great. Which always makes me wonder why in other areas of my life I have sometimes been less than adventurous. I talk a good talk about autonomy, exploration, and new horizons. But more often than I’d care to admit I fall prey to the resistance to error that has been imprinted on me by various factions, even when those factions might not have realized they were nudging me toward conformity and too much safety.
Our brains are seen by neuroscientists as prediction machines.
Seminal theories in neuroscience cast the brain as a prediction machine. In helping us navigate the world, the brain makes constant predictions about what is likely to happen next, including as a result of our own actions. These predictions are derived from prior experiences and their value is clear – they allow us to overcome the sluggishness in our sensory inputs and motor outputs, and to minimise surprise, which can be costly.
So be it. Perhaps that’s how we’ve evolved to think and respond. I know a lot of biology and human nature are to blame for any reticence I might have for the less obvious choice. But I also see myself as a nonconformist, being a rebel and maverick, and taking chances. When I belie that view of myself, it stings. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I want to be the person I envision I am. Maybe I can do better and spin the wheel of chance occasionally and venture forth into unknown territory that might bring me joy and some associated surprises.
Surprise is fun. Whether we’re traveling in a foreign country and stumble upon a cozy local café or randomly stroll down a bookstore or library aisle grabbing for a volume that turns out to be just the book we needed to read at that moment, surprise is a lovely thing.
Sure, there are bad surprises too. That’s life. I’m not advocating for walking into the eye of a storm you clearly see is going to cast you asunder and crush you on the rocks of an ill-fated decision. Most choices in life aren’t that stark. Most are far more nuanced. Parsing out a well-calculated risk from an obvious bad choice comes with some aspects of the decision ultimately left to chance, but I think we usually know if something is worth the risk. We can resist the inertia that ties us down to our sensible choices. The resulting experiences and outcomes can rise above the mundane safe paths. Errors aren’t always errors. Sometimes they’re just positive developments that are clouded by our error-minimizing brain.
Let me further illustrate the problem with error-minimisation, whether in the context of a machine learning algorithm or a surprise-avoidant human. Suppose you set out to open a restaurant and, to maximise success, you find out people’s favourite foods. You will end up opening a pizzeria. Congratulations, you have minimised your loss function. Now imagine this process is repeated by friendly competitors. We would be faced with strings of eateries serving the same foods. In fact, we can bear witness to this result in the restaurants available to us, because pizza, on average, works. But Noma, the best restaurant in the world according to Restaurant magazine in 2021, has moss on the menu. Its founders strayed from the expected, actually aimed for error, and won. Would a machine learning algorithm have predicted that? How about an error-minimising brain? And why is Noma listed as the best restaurant in the world? Is it that moss is uniquely delicious relative to pizza? Or is it in homage to the restaurateur’s decision to throw uncertainty-minimisation to the wind?
I don’t plan to open a cutting-edge restaurant. My inclination isn’t to launch a groundbreaking startup company. Each morning I’m still likely to saunter over to my local coffeeshop to caffeinate my day while talking to the usual cast of friends and acquaintances who do the same. But maybe, just maybe, I can throw caution to the wind now and then. Maybe I can consciously choose the thing that at first looks like an error.
But really what I recommend is that you hold space for the unexpected and the unknown. Holding space, lining the borders of our priors with wide margins, is a costly but worthwhile affair, especially if you value the uniquely human phenomena of mystery, laughter, wonder, vision and awe. So gamble sometimes. Consider the range of possibilities. Make room for error, before and after a decision. Click on an article you have no interest in. Mess with the algorithm. Swipe right on a ‘not your type’ one in 10 times. Increase the entropy in your options. Because error can be tragic but it can just as well be magic.
By the way, after reading this article I did swipe right on a profile of someone not usually my type. While it didn’t go anywhere in terms of erotic attraction, we did end up having a incredibly interesting conversation about his passion and profession in an organization that seeks to make the world a much better place. That was a surprise manifesting from what some would have seen as error. I hope I have the fortitude and courage to take more chances, risk more errors, and bask in those surprises that come my way. I hope that for you too.
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