Nobody went anywhere in that first airship. Of course, I’m writing this just after booking airplane tickets for a cross country production gig, so let’s agree that new ideas sometimes take a little time to mature after their first outings.
“What good is a newborn baby?”
That’s Benjamin Franklin, just outside Paris one afternoon at a technology demonstration in August, 1783. He allegedly offered this riposte to a skeptical onlooker who wondered aloud how, in any way, could there be value in the hot air balloon rising from the ground in front of them and hundreds of other onlookers. Ambassador Franklin’s now famous bon mot chiseled another deft and surprisingly fecund bit of wit into the history books. He would have said it in French: “A quoi bon l’enfant qui vient de naître?” (I wasn’t there, of course, but it would have come out something like that.)
The origin of things does not necessarily foretell how they will evolve or transform in the future. When that globe aérostatique rose into the French sky that late 18th century afternoon, nobody could have predicted thousands of flights a day in metal airships, movies playing privately at each seat, and overpriced beer available in plastic cups served from rolling carts. Ideas don’t typically evolve elegantly from point to point like dainty caterpillars declaring the time has come for unfurling new wings. Ideas crash and careen like seedlings caught in unpredictable zephyrs, slapping into unexpected obstructions, carried long distances in clear air, tumbled like refuse until they take root in unexpected cracks in unloved pavement. Most seeds die.
The few that thrive are the ones that have a chance of catching our attention. But even in full bloom, the cold reality is that most of the time we don’t give a moment’s thought to their unexpected, unpredictable origins.
“How do you feel?”
Sigmund Freud is essentially a relic of intellectual antiquity in terms of modern psychotherapy, an anachronism. Freud’s early thinking about the mind, the unconscious, and the way people develop their own personalities, however, largely ignited the modern study of how people think about themselves and their relationships with others. The fact that the practical value of his work is now forehead-smackingly obtuse and effectively useless does not impugn the radical thinking it must have taken for him simply to generate his ideas when he had them. His ideas weren’t only new, they were spectacularly inventive. (We could also add “ridiculous”, but that doesn’t dispel their imaginative energies, misguided though they may be.) In the many decades following his work, social science continues to present dramatically different views about human development, personality, and interpersonal relations. Some of those paradigmatic changes are profound, including imperative repudiations of his deeply ingrained misogyny, lack of scientific rigor, obsession with bizarre symbolism, and so much more. But Freud matters simply for asking what others hadn’t asked as clearly at the time. Sure, he was mostly wrong, but in terms of this essay’s particular consideration, that’s really not the point. The world of modern psychotherapy is nothing like the world Freudian psychoanalysis, but we cannot forget the spark of inquiry that provoked profoundly more relevant growth in the field, even if we reject it its initial precepts and conclusions.
Franklin, again: “What good is a newborn baby?” If we’re talking about a creative initiative you’re developing, whatever it may be, there is precisely zero value to your work if your time horizon is too short. It’s hard to know what will grow from your labors, or what may provoke radically transformative growth in others. You can guess, you can extrapolate, but you can’t know. What you can do is stay with your project and find out what happens.
It’s tricky, though. Staying with dead-end ideas too long gets you hot air balloons that go up, come down, and effectively go nowhere. You have to know when to abandon something and move on. What matters more is determining if you’re on to something worth pursuing. Then it’s up to you to chase it like a leopard chases lunch if you ever want it to matter. You don’t have to know exactly what might grow from your work, and it’s possible that history may recall that you weren’t the person to coax its most profound value into bloom. But once committed to creating something new, you’re automatically committed to that new thing taking on a life of its own.