Avoiding the Truth Undermines Your Ability to Create

A key ingredient to creating something of enduring value is accepting the truth.

Enduring value is undermined when required things are not done, when things are done incorrectly and when there is dishonesty about either current reality or the desired result.

What definition of truth will best guide the person who wishes to create?

The language that lawyers use to describe the truth in court is inadequate to describe truth in the world. There is a famous story of King Canute ordering the tide not come in. He was the giver of laws and issued an absurd law. In the legal system, the truth is subjected to both the King and the King's law.

In other words, both laws and interpreters of law can easily differ from the reality of the world. This is why the legal system can never find one innocent but rather it finds them guilty or not guilty. The legal system can not find the truth but it can find what is false or not false.

The best working definition for creating is that truth is "what works in the world over time". If you want to know whether your creation is beautiful or functional you must take it into the world and test it.

Many institutions focus so much effort upon their self-interest that they lose the ability to tell the truth over time. They act like a sports team that is defending a lead instead of playing the game. They forget the very things that led to their success and attempt to manage success as if it can be manipulated.

When you create a new medicine, there is a protocol called double-blind testing, that allows a researcher to see the truth when comparing the new medicine to alternatives. The major concept in double-blind is that parties involved in creating and those with vested interests in the results tend to have biases that prevent them from seeing the objective truth.

There is also a great difference between a "long-term" and "short-term" study as the most significant effects (positive or negative) may not appear for decades in a medical study. I am not proposing that the creative person must wait decades but rather that when testing whether your creation is working in the world, one must continue to pay attention to the object created and all its consequences, intended and unintended.

Being honest about the good and bad of current reality and being as clear as possible about the qualities of the desired result are key to empowering the creative process. The "world" is available for testing your creation in many ways but do not expect it to either embrace or reject your creation outright.

Creation is iterative, and your early failures may in fact be the most important lessons in teaching yourself to create. When looking at a difficult task, I like to estimate the number of mistakes (lessons) to be encountered along the way. A long-term difficult project may be a 1000 mistake project. The goal is to make your mistakes early and keep them small but remember that your ultimate success requires the learning in your early mistaken efforts.

The truth does set you free. Free to let go of what does not work and that prevents you from failing in the end.

A Set of Skills for Life-Long Learning

I taught a course at the State University of New York, Empire State College entitled "Math for Decision Making" for almost ten years. It was the college math course for people who were either afraid of math or had done poorly at math through their lives.



The course began with two primary activities: self-assessment so that students could understand what they knew and what they didn't know and a journal to support the student's development of critical thinking skills.



The self-diagnosis allowed the student and myself to focus our efforts where learning needed to occur and the journal became a shared dialogue between the student and the class that supported engaging learning in a sometimes playful, often creative way. Asking questions and taking risks are two essential elements to learning and yet most of our formal education has discouraged or worse punished this behavior.

We worked on going from asking data and opinion questions to asking critical thinking questions. Critical thinking questions are those which examine the assumptions and "frames" through which we view the world.

For example, several years ago ethanol became a "cheaper" alternative to petroleum for a variety of reasons. A government funded industry grew up around producing ethanol from food products (mostly corn) and as the price of petroleum raced to its peak in 2008, from a distance ethanol seemed to be a solution.
As a fuel, how does ethanol compare to petroleum? It is a less powerful fuel per unit of fuel.
How much energy does it take to produce ethanol from corn? It takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn (when you include the entire cycle of corn production) than it delivers to the vehicles burning it. The entire cycle is grossly inefficient.
Why was ethanol so cheap several years ago? Corn ethanol was cheap because there was a surplus of corn.
What has the use of food for ethanol production done to food costs? As food was diverted to ethanol production, the price of corn, wheat & rice and many other food staples was driven up globally, deepening the woes of the most impoverished people.

If you read or listened to any media stories promoting corn ethanol did they focus on this when congress was setting money aside for this activity and entrepreneurs were seeking investors for new ethanol production plants?

Engaging in dialogue or journal writing and asking critical thinking questions are extremely useful in developing a broad set of learning skills.