So, I was reading a book about entrepreneurship and I noticed several things that caught my attention that talked about failure and creativity. And in one of its chapters there was an interesting thought experiment that I am going to replicate here, and to which I also added my own plot twist.
The experiment is called “Failure 101” and the point of it is to try to create a product that no one would dare to buy. You have to make an invention so useless and so unnecessary that no one on earth would buy. The book gives examples such as hamster bath tubs and kites that can be flown in hurricanes. I personally thought of several products, but the one I ended up going with was a dotless die (i.e. a blank cube). It seems pretty useless to me, although there are uses for it.
The intention of the experiment is that we become familiar with and lose the fear of failure through purposefully failure. The logic behind it is that by intentionally making mistakes we are expected to lose our fear of failing, hence the name of the experiment.
So, if you want to have a little fun and challenge your creativity, you can try to find a product so unnecessary that no one would buy for any reason, because that's the first step. So, you can put your mind to the test, and just be cool.
Plot twist
Now the next step, which is my plot twist, if you decided to participate - and you should only read this if you've already thought about the product you're going to make, you shouldn't skip the first step - is to find a way on earth to sell that product. Now that you have thought of an deliberate failure, you have to think of a way to turn that failure into a success and get the product sold. It can be quite fun to try and although for most of the products I thought of I found odd uses for it, for the dotless die I found, in fact, a very good use for it. It is a customizable die, you can put whatever numbers you want on each side of the die and you can have your own custom made die. In my opinion it seems quite a useful invention, although initially I thought the opposite, and it probably already exists, because it seems even more useful in some occasions than a conventional die.
Now it becomes an exercise in creativity and it's about thinking outside the box. How to find a use for something useless and sell something unsaleable. You have to rethink what you already thought and look at the same thing with different eyes. We will often realize that almost anything, no matter what, can become useful if we see it in the right light. Making us see that the supposed “uselessness” is not inherent to the object, but is more a matter of how we perceive it.
We just have to exercise our creativity, and for that, the book, conveniently, also lists eight mental barriers that prevent us from thinking creatively. For example, that we tend to think only logically and look for the right answer. Often there is not just one answer, and none of them may be the right one. Nor should we become accustomed to limit ourselves to thinking only within the confines of logic. Personally I have sometimes thought that in order to resolve seemingly logical paradoxes, we must contradictorily forget human logic and think with an open mind about perspectives that do not seem at all plausible, since sometimes it was our very misuse of logic that led us to such a paradox.
Other barriers are that we are used to obeying rules (which is very much related to the logic barrier) and to being practical; we don't want to be foolish or make mistakes; and the last two, that we are not comfortable going into a field other than our specialty and tend to think we are not creative. If we dare to cross all these barriers (or at least some of them) it will be easier to come up with a creative idea.
I find all these tips quite useful to cultivate our creativity, I found them quite remarkable, and I keep the idea that if we try to fail on purpose we will eventually lose the fear of failure.
So I invite you to try this brief thought experiment and see if you find it fun. Just, be cool. And I'm curious, did you think of a product to sell?