...But I Digress
The wandering mind is still the fastest route to something great, because it is in fact the only route to something great
“But I digress” is a thing people say after saying something far more interesting than whatever they were supposed to be saying. Which is a very strange thing to apologise for.
“Oh! Sorry, I accidentally said something interesting, I seem to have forgotten that this is meant to be boring!” As if every thought should march in a straight line from Point A to Point B like it’s running on Benito Mussolini’s train timetable.
Do people really think the purpose of thinking is to arrive on time? That seems absurd to me. Once you’ve arrived, you’ve stopped moving.
Too much of the corporate world is built around the assumption that optimisation is preferable. We optimise processes. We optimise workflows. We optimise customer journeys. We optimise websites, logistics, supply chains, media buys, calendars and increasingly it now seems that we are attempting to optimise conversations.
Worst of all, it’s now become de rigueur to treat thought itself as something that should also be optimised. This trend can only be the work of people who have never had an interesting thought in their entire lives.
Nobody has ever had an original idea by being efficient. That’s an oxymoron. Originality cannot be efficient.
Yet the wandering mind is still the fastest route to something great, because it is in fact the only route to something great. Trying to get to somewhere great efficiently will only ever lead you to somewhere asinine instead of the somewhere great you want to get to.
This ability to digress is obvious in children, who possess an untarnished ability to begin discussing the Stegasaurs and arrive at Jupiter via a brief discussion as to why kidney is a bean, an organ, and also the word ‘kid’ and the word ‘knee’.
In the corporate world there are too many people who would call this a distraction.
When children do it we immediately recognise it as curiosity, but when adults do it we treat it as a deficiency of focus. But you have to remember, curiosity is simply distractedness viewed from a more flattering angle.
A good slice of the history of brilliant ideas is the history of people getting sidetracked. Penicillin emerged because Alexander Fleming was not paying attention to mold. The microwave exists because Percy Spencer was thinking about radar and accidentally melted a chocolate bar.
So much of our species’ scientific and artistic breakthroughs were built upon people noticing something they were supposed to ignore. A focused mind is very good at finding what it is looking for. But it takes a wandering mind to occasionally find things nobody was looking for. Which is more useful if you want to be original, innovative, creative, or clever.
This is especially true in professions where people spend a great deal of time pretending to know where they are going. Take advertising! How many neat, proprietary processes have you seen in agency creds decks? Too many of course.
The actual path to great ideas is far closer to a man chasing a squirrel through a hedge and emerging three hours later holding an insight than it is to a factory assembly line.
Most of our most useful thoughts arrive disguised as irrelevant thoughts. You start joking about medieval marginalia and little tiny knights fighting giant snails and then you discover something remarkably useful about CPG brand packaging. Somehow it all joins together in a way that appears, to outside observers, almost magical.
It is not magical.
It’s simply that good ideas are made from stupid tangents piled on top of one another until something unexpectedly brilliant starts happening.
The problem is that pile of stupid tangents looks like an absolute mess while it is working and doing its thing. Because it is a mess. Because mess is part of the process through which you arrive at smart thinking.
Some people hate this. Some people prefer looking organised even when they are are having rubbish ideas. And digressions by definition look completely pointless right up until the moment they aren’t.
But if you listen to those people then you’ll never have good ideas. Just like they never have good ideas. Not because they’re idiots, but because they’re too focused on getting to an answer as optimally as possible, and so they treat digression and tangents and distraction as inconveniences rather than the fuel for brilliance that they are.
My favourite writer, G.K. Chesterton, or as I like to call him ‘O.G. Besterton’, said that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. And I think that a tangent is much the same. Because a digression is best considered as a useful thought that has yet proven itself to be useful.
But anyway, I digress...