Too much information can cause you to get scared and stop

When a prestigious university gave me the opportunity to create a course curriculum for their continuing education department, you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.

This project forced me to do something infinitely exciting for me, which was to uncover the architecture around my own creative process. By deconstructing what I’d been doing rather intuitively and abstractly for pretty much my whole life, the principles that silently guided my unique creative behavior finally started to announce themselves.

It felt like discovering plutonium by accident.

A few months later, the department administrator sat down with me to review my proposed outline for the curriculum. She said the material looked solid, and now the only thing left to do was talk about the university’s content licensing agreement.

Excuse me, the what?

It’s standard, policy, she explained. If you sign a vendor contract with us, in exchange for the opportunity to teach a new class, our department legally retains full ownership of this intellectual property in perpetuity.

That wiped the smile off my face immediately. In fact, it scared the hell out of me. The idea of putting tons of work into this highly personal project, and then surrendering ownership forever, thanks but no thanks.

You can take my life, but you’ll never take my ideas.

Suffice it to say, that course never saw the light of day. It was definitely more disappointing for me than it was for the university, but like most failures, it was a blessing in disguise. Because instead of turning that material into a college class, my curriculum evolved into several creative iterations that not only were deeply satisfying to create, but actually had more of an impact over time.

There was the trilogy of books, this very software platform, and the series of workshops, all of which are mine, to own, forever. Those products wouldn’t exist in the world without that college course project going kaput.

While telling this story to a friend of mine recently, he asked an interesting reflection question:

If you had known about the university’s content licensing agreement ahead of time, would you still have invested that two months in the project?

Absolutely not. Knowing my personality, that caveat would have been a deal breaker from the start.

Yet another case study in the executional power of ignorance. Because in many cases, the best way to make something is to not know anything. Whereas having too much information at the start can make you get scared and stop.

My favorite basketball player once said that the when you don’t know where you’re going, nobody can stop you.

That mantra applies perfectly to the above story. Had I known where I was going with the curriculum, the person to stop me would have been me.

Are you obsessed with where you’re going, or listening for where life is taking you?