Genius Mental Lapses
March 11, 2020
In late February 2020 BC (Before Corona), I organized a bachelor party for my brother. Known in French as “l’enterrement de vie de garçon” (which translates to “funeral of boy life”), his best friends and close family celebrated his burial by skiing, ice fishing and rocking out to every classic jam on the CD powered jukebox at our Airbnb. As with any bash, one or two songs stand out amongst the rest. The anthem of this bachelor party was The Beatle's track “Hard Day’s Night”.
Weeks later, as I listened to the track again, I soberly took in how amazing and simple this song is. Newly obsessed, I learned to play it on guitar, sent it to all of my friends (4 times for good measure) and researched it's conception. When I opened up it’s dedicated wiki page, it finally dawned on me that I have absolutely no idea what a “hard day’s night” is.
This passage from Paul McCartney’s, Many Years From Now (1) describes what the Fab Four thought:
Ringo would always say grammatically incorrect phrases and we'd all laugh," George Harrison recalls. McCartney concurs, "Ringo would do these little malapropisms; he would say things slightly wrong, like people do, but his were always wonderful, very lyrical, very Lewis Carroll, lovely. They were sort of magic even though he was just getting it wrong. As to one particular malapropism, Paul continues, "he said after a concert, 'Phew, it's been a hard day's night.' John and I went, 'What? What did you just say?' He said, 'I'm bloody knackered, man, it's been a hard day's night.'
Known by rock and roll history buffs, Ringo’s endearing band mates actually took his malapropism seriously and later turned it into gold... then platinum (4x in the US alone). The freedom to shamelessly make mistakes resulted in rare lyrical beauty from Ringo. ~56 years later, I am still idiotically dancing to it today.
You might have had enough of "The 8 Days A Week" & "Love Is All You Need" nonsense, but I promise you that Ringo's mistake is an example of something bigger.
A Take On Agile
If you work in software, you will certainly be familiar with Agile methodology. The entire process is founded on fast development cycles to ship features with the acceptance of the inherently higher probabilities for mistakes. The fast, iterative nature of it all welcomes in the bugs with the payoff of extra freedom to try many, incremental approaches to building a product.
[Clears throat]... Agile gives developers the freedom to create chaos... It screams an anti-perfectionist ethos.
Value Outside Of Software?
Where would our civilization be without Penicillin? The inventor, Dr. Alexander Flemming, returned from a summer vacation in Scotland to his filthy lab bench in London. After examining a strange, empty halo/ring in a Petri dish containing Staphylococci (a common bacterium for all you other laymen), Fleming concluded that the mold released a substance that repressed the growth of other bacteria. This mold was later identified as Penicillium (the fungi that produces Penicillin).
Here's what Dr. Flemming had to say (3):
When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.
Alright, What's Your Point
Freedom of thought is the first phrase to come to mind, but I think it goes deeper than a NY Times Best Seller, Self-Help, book title (laugh here please). This collection of serendipitous stories isn’t meant to tip us into an off-balanced, randomly motivated world. Its most apparent motive is to figuratively open our eyes to the genius that may be the result of the unintentional and unforeseen. It is my opinion that being able to make mistakes is a valuable freedom that must be protected from the condescending and scientific frugality whenever possible. Humans have and always will make mistakes; we ought to capitalize on them.
Would The Beatles have “Hard Day’s Night” if they condescended to Ringo after his linguistic error?
Sources
(1) - McCartney, Paul. Many Years From Now. pp. 163-65.
(2) - Did a Computer Bug Help Deep Blue Beat Kasparov?, edited by Klint Finley, link.
(3) - Merkel, Dr. Howard. The real story behind penicillin, link.
(4) - "Radar - Father of the Microwave Oven." CLT, link.
(5) - Peters, Peter. "W.C Roentgen and the discovery of X-rays." link.
(6)- Hofmann, Dr. Albert. "LSD: Completely Personal." 1996, link.
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