Things Going As Planned Versus Things Going Well
The historian Ada Palmer points out that one of the most recurring patterns of change and progress is that things often don’t go the way people planned or imagined. In the early days of the Renaissance, for example, the Italian poet Petrarch helped recover ancient texts, hoping they would vindicate one worldview: Christianity. Instead, they unleashed many worldviews—new philosophies, new sciences, new medicines. “So he did not create a world that went as he wanted,” Palmer said, “but he created a world that went well.” Or, another example: the way trains and bicycles led to changes their inventors never set out to create. By making it easier for people to move more freely and independently, they gave us the suffragettes. “Suddenly,” Palmer said, “women could organize and mobilize. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women’s liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes.” And so, it’s one of the great things we can learn from history: “things ‘going my way’ versus things ‘going well’ is a really important distinction.”
The distinction between things going as planned or imagined versus things going well—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Castles In The Air
In my favorite scene in Little Women, the four March sisters and their friend Laurie spend an afternoon up on a hill they call “Delectable Mountain,” because it’s there that they can look off into the distance and see “where we hope to live some time.” There on Delectable Mountain, they slip into taking turns trading their “Castles in the Air”—the most ideal future each can dream up, if they could have anything they wished. Laurie wants to travel the world, then settle in Germany and become a famous musician. Meg wants a big house full of beautiful things, good food, expensive furniture, and heaps of money. Amy wants to go to Rome and become the greatest artist in the world. Jo wants to be a rich and famous author who lives in a house with every room piled high with books. And Beth only wants to be able to provide and care for her family. Then their lives unfold over the next three hundred pages or so. And in the final pages of the book, the sisters are together again when Jo makes a comment about the beautiful lives they’ve built. “And yet your life is very different from the one you pictured so long ago,” Amy said. “Do you remember our castles in the air?” Remembering the castles they dreamed up on Delectable Mountain all those years ago, they marvel that none of their lives turned out the way they’d imagined. Meg didn’t get her heaps of money. Jo didn’t become a rich and famous author. Amy didn’t become the greatest artist in the world. “But in spite of these unromantic facts,” Jo says, “I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life.” “My castle is very different from what I planned,” Amy agrees, “but I would not alter it.”
If “Bruce” Had Worked As Planned…
In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie. That wasn’t the plan. The script called for the mechanical shark, affectionately nicknamed “Bruce,” to be featured prominently throughout the film. When Bruce was tested in a Hollywood fresh water tank, it worked fine. But when production moved to the Atlantic Ocean, the salt water corroded its electrical components and the shark broke. So director Steven Spielberg faced what seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen on the set of a movie conceived to revolve around a working mechanical shark. Working on a tight budget and schedule that left no room to delay, Spielberg reimagined the movie. Instead of shooting direct encounters with the shark, he developed techniques to create the illusion of the shark’s point of view. “I played a lot of the fear from the people in the water,” Spielberg explained, “from seeing their legs kicking, from the point of view of the camera moving along the surface of the water.” Filming as though through the shark’s eyes as it glided just under the surface in a slow, menacing advance—“That’s what turned the movie into more of an exercise in suspense than just a horror film,” Spielberg later reflected. “Jaws is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do.” Later asked about Bruce’s disastrous breakdown, Spielberg said it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to the movie. If he’d had the shark working as planned in the original script, he said, “I would have made a movie that wouldn’t have been as successful…I think the film would have made half the money had the shark worked.”
Disaster Can Reorder Our Lives In Wonderful Ways
At sixteen, Mike Nichols’s girlfriend’s parents gave him tickets to a Broadway play that turned out to redirect the course of his life. In college, a chance interaction with a cafeteria busboy led to him attending weekly improv workshops, where he soaked up practices and principles of creativity and collaboration that turned out to define his career. At a train station, he struck up a conversation with Elaine May, beginning a friendship that led to them forming “Nichols and May,” an improv duo whose Grammy-winning comedy albums and hit Broadway shows made them a national sensation. Looking back on these and other decisive moments in his life, Nichols was struck by the deceptive nature of things—the way a seemingly minor thing can turn out to be an important thing, for instance. Or the way an apparently negative thing can turn out to be a positive thing. Or the way an initially unsuccessful thing can turn out to be a celebrated thing. “You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Nichols said. “Big things look like little things. Little things don’t have big signs on them that say, ‘This Is a Big Thing.’ They look like everything else. Disaster can reorder our lives in wonderful ways, and you just go on to the next thing.”
Good luck? Bad luck?
The origins of this story are difficult to trace. It evokes an era where farming was the primary livelihood, horses were vital to do this farming, and conscription for military service worked like this: if the army showed up at your door and said you were in, you stopped what you were doing and marched off to war. So the story probably takes place sometime between ancient times (200-ish BC) and the late medieval period (1500s). Most often, it’s set in China. Although in some tellings, the samurai show up. So—somewhere in China or Japan, at some point across a 1700-year span—there was a farmer. One day, the farmer’s only horse ran away. The neighbors rushed over and yelled, “What bad luck!” The farmer shrugged, “Good luck? Bad luck? It’s impossible to know.” A few days later, the horse returned with a herd of wild horses. The neighbors rushed over again and this time yelled, “What good luck!” The farmer shrugged and repeated, “Good luck? Bad luck? It’s impossible to know.” A few days later, while trying to corral the wild stallions, one kicked the farmer’s son and broke his leg. The neighbors: “What bad luck!” The farmer: “Good luck? Bad luck? It’s impossible to know.” A few days later, the Han army or the Kamakura Samurai or some other large military unit showed up unannounced at the farm and demanded that the son (Dad’s too old) take up arms or sword or bow and arrow and join them in a bloody war. But when they saw the son’s broken leg, they rode or walked away. And instead of being sent to the front lines—and likely to his death—the son stayed home on the farm. Good luck? Bad luck?
And Beautiful Things Can Come From That
On set, shooting movies like The Dark Knight or Inception, the writer and director Christopher Nolan’s reputation is that he gets very lucky with the weather. “It’s completely untrue,” Nolan said in an interview. “I’m very unlucky with the weather. But I made a decision early on that whatever the weather is, I will shoot…We just shoot, whether it’s pouring rain or the sun is out. And beautiful things can come from that.” Things do not always go the way you wanted, planned, or imagined. And beautiful things can come from that.