Naïveté is best summed up by famed comedian/actor Steve Martin:

“Naïveté is that wonderful quality that keeps you from knowing how unprepared you are for what you’re about to do.” ~ Steve Martin

In his autobiography, Steve Martin recounts how being naïve about the level of effort and time it’d take to succeed in stand-up comedy is what allowed him to begin his journey early on. By his own admission, he began his comedy career ill-prepared to achieve his goals.

In fact, early on he only knew one thing for certain: he wanted to be wildly different than other comedians. He didn’t even know exactly what he meant when he first wrote it in his journal. He simply allowed himself to create an ambitious goal and begin working towards its achievement.

How Naïveté Lead To An 11 Billion Dollar Industry

On Christmas Eve, 1978, 2 Hewlet-Packard engineers (John Vaught and Dave Donald) were having a casual conversation about the design of HP’s newest printer. During the conversation, they admitted that, if they could own any printer in the world, it’d have very different qualities than what they’d just built. They wanted a high-resolution color printer capable of more than 200 dpi (dots per inch).

Unfortunately, technology was not even close to making this possible. Printer technology in the 1970’s was limited to squeezing ink out of a tiny tube onto a piece of paper. It was a slow and messy process that left ink blots all over the paper.

In the beginning, Vaught and Donald weren’t sure how they’d be able to design “their ideal printer” or if it’d even be possible, but they began enthusastically anyway. They began with naïveté.

Early on, they tried ideas that other engineers had tried to make work in the past and, like them, failed. It appeared that they weren’t any smarter than other engineers who’d struggled with the problem before.

Then they had a weird idea… instead of pushing ink out of a tube, why not try heating the ink so that it exploded? They mounted a tiny resister in the ink tube and flipped the switch. The ink exploded and shot out of the tube. They began showing their experiment to other engineers in hopes of enlisting support for an “exploding ink printer.”

Oddly enough, nobody at HP could actually explain why their experiment was working, even though they could clearly see it was. “Because its inner workings were not understood, even a number of the people who actually saw the device operating told him that his approach could not work. Vaught’s reply was, ‘but it is working” (Corporate Creativity, p.162).

It took a long time before the exploding ink phenomena was understood. Liquid doesn’t always boil and turn into gas at boiling point. Super-heating liquid quickly causes liquid to explode and remain a liquid for a brief time (a term now called vapor explosion). But back in 1979, nobody knew this was possible.

Less than a year after their “casual conversation,” HP invested 250,000$ into developing Vaught and Donald’s “pet project” into the most revolutionary printer the world had seen. Today, HP still a dominant player in the printer industry.

… and it all began with naïveté.

So why should you embrace Naïveté in your next project?

Here’s a few great reasons:

Nievete Allows Us to Begin Ambitious Projects Quickly

When you’re blissfully unaware of how complicated everything might get in the future, you’re able to take decisive action NOW on your new idea. Thus, it lowers what we require of ourselves before beginning a creative project. This allows us to take actions quickly and learn from them instead of getting caught up in endlessly guessing at possible future problems and solutions.

Corporations understand that not all profitable products start out looking profitable. That’s why many of them have been trying to tap the power of naïveté by using skunkworks projects. The main idea behind a skunkwork project is to lower the barriers required for creative employees to try out new ideas.

Had Vaught and Donald tried to make their exploding ink experiment an official project at HP right away, they’d have found zero support. In fact, they found little support even after they’d run successful tests of their new idea. The experiement became a successful product (and then a successful industry) only because Vaught and Donald kept their project unofficial until they’d proved the potential value of their idea to key decision-makers.

Often, the time it takes to run an experiment with a new idea takes less time than it’d take to “thoroughly research” whether or not its possible. This is one of many benefits of nievete.

Naïveté Allows Us to Master Lower-Level Skills Before Worrying About High-Level Skills

We’re always most effective when there’s a balance between our skill-set and the challenge we’re facing. If you’re skills are too high for the challenge you face, you get bored. If they’re too low, you’ll feel overwhelmed or anxious. Neither leads to optimal creativity.

In an effort to “not make a mistake,” we often air on the side of caution by over-preparing, but that knowledge often ends up making us feel even less prepared then when we started.

Every round of analysis sheds new light on skills or knowledge that we (still) don’t have while our actual skill-level remains the same because we haven’t actually applied that knowledge yet. We’ve essentially increased our challenge by learning everything we “also have to do,” while keeping our skill-level the same. This results in increased anxiety and procrastination.

When Steve Martin started out, he acknowledged that he didn’t have any idea if his new idea of “anti-comedy” would be successful. It was so different from everything else comedians were doing at the time that the two couldn’t be compared. The naïveté is what allowed him to try out a new, completely untested idea. According to Martin, he spent 10 years learning his craft (by constantly experimenting on stage), 4 years refining it, and 4 years in wild success.

Naïveté Boost Self-Efficacy

When you keep your goals simple, you allow yourself to succeed early on. You don’t have to tackle everything at once. Nor do you have to apply a host of “expert rules” that far exceed your skill-level. You can produce a creative work and feel the instant gratification of having created something.

As you produce more and more, your skills increase. At a certain point, your skills exceed the challenge and you’ll naturally start upping the challenge. By keeping your goals simple early on, you create an environment where you can both succeed and learn.

What would have happened if Vaught and Donald didn’t embrace their naïveté? Had they taken a step back before experimenting and “did their research,” they’d have likely learned that what they were trying to do was (thought to be) impossible. If it wasn’t possible… why even try? The project would never have been started.

It was ignorance that allowed for their early success.

Naïveté Sidesteps Needless Worry

How often do you catch yourself worrying about a future problem that never actually ends up happening?

Over-preparation is an attempt to cut off all possible problems before they start. Yet only a small fraction of those problems will actually occur. If they do, your ability to solve them in the moment is far superior to any solution you could have imagined in the past.

Recall how other HP employees reacted to Vaught and Donald’s exploding ink. Even though they saw it working, they were still incredulous. Instead of viewing the exploding ink as a possible breakthrough, they focused on all the problems that “could” happen.

In contrast, Vaught and Donald were focused on all the possibilities. They understood that there would be problems down the road, but they didn’t let the fear of a future problem stop them from taking action in the moment. They didn’t have to solve every problem, they simply had to solve the one directly in front of them.

What if you took all of the energy you were wasting on solving problems that never happen and diverted it towards mastering the work directly in front of you? Not only would you save time and energy that could be used for productive work, but your ability to focus on the step directly in front of you would drastically increase your ability to acquire new skills, which you could then use if the problem actual does occur.

“But If I Don’t Prepare, I’ll Fail”

Naïveté isn’t about downplaying the importance of learning new skills, it’s about starting your next creative project with the understanding that you can take on new challenges as they emerge.

The goal isn’t to be naïve a month or year from now. The goal is to allow yourself to take action in the present moment without hampering yourself with every imaginable problem that could occur later.

Very few (if any) creative projects require high levels of analysis before beginning. Almost always, the only barrier to the project is your own need to feel certain about what will happen in the future.

CreativityMastery’s Launch

Why would I launch my blog by arguing for ignorance in creativity?

Because that’s where we must all begin.

We have 2 choices when starting a a new creative project. We can either accept that we don’t know (and can never know) exactly what will happen in the future and get to work anyway or we can obsess about all the problems that might happen in the future and spin our wheels at the starting line.

You don’t need to understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into. You just need to be willing to get started and learn from your experiences.

The unknown is an inspiring place to be… but only if you allow it to inspire you.