Living with Ambiguity

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Living with Ambiguity

December 12, 2008. By Peter Lloyd

I got off the plane at Shannon Airport in County Clare, Ireland, and noticed two clocks at either end of the main lobby. They disagreed, by about five minutes. I mentioned this discrepancy to a baggage handler, and he wasted no time teaching me an important lesson in creative thinking.

"If they both gave the same time," he said, "we wouldn't need two clocks, now, would we?"

I like that kind of thinking. It's so much healthier than logic. Because it allows for ambiguity. If you can live with ambiguity, you can deal better with contradiction, which is everywhere. And the better you can deal with contradiction, the more in tune you are with the universe, which is basically chaos.

You may have noticed that creative people seem to have an appetite for chaos. And that's good. Otherwise, boredom would soon set in and lull us all into a permanent coma. People would start conforming, following their leaders blindly, like lemmings. Never stopping to ask, "Are we sure jumping off this cliff is going to be positive experience?"

If you follow lemming logic, though, you have to jump with the crowd, because if you don't, all your fellow lemmings will die in vain. Right?

Of course not. You have to go against the grain. Because your brain comes equipped with a unique point of view. And it's only natural for you to see things differently.

Make the most of this ambiguity. Just don't expect people to appreciate your originality. It would be dangerous if they did. Because, to paraphrase the Irish baggage handler...

"If we all thought the same way, we wouldn't need more than one brain, now, would we."

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

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