A Bad First Draft of Your Self

" That bad first draft, that’s the most valuable thing. That’s what you need: you need a bad first draft of yourself. 

There’s an idea that Jung developed about The Trickster, or The Jester, or The Comedian. 

The Trickster is the precursor to The Saviour. That’s one of the things I learned from Jung that was just so unlikely. 

You’d never think that. It’s so amazing that that might be the case. The satirical and the ironic and the troublemaker, the comedian—the fool is the precursor to the saviour. Why? 

Because you’re a fool when you start something new. 

And so, if you’re not willing to be a fool, then you’ll never start anything new. And if you never start anything new, then you won’t develop. And so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation. That’s the same as humility. 

If you’re going to write your destiny, you can do a bad first job. 

You’re going to get smarter as you move forward.

Something beckons to you. That’s what happens, here. Maybe the star that Geppetto wished on was the wrong damn star, but at least it was a star, right? At least it was in the sky. At least it moved him forward. And so you say in your life, well, something grips you, and fills you with interest. And you think, should I do that? 

The answer is, if not that, then something! 

What if it’s a mistake? It’s a mistake! Rest assured. What do you know? You’re going to stumble around, right? And what’s going to happen is this: you’re going to not stay in stasis; you’re not going to wander around in circles. I see people like that. 

They say, well, I never knew what to do, and now I’m 40. That’s not so good. 

That’s not so good, and there is a literature, too, that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy, when they look back on their lives, about the things they didn’t do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things. And so that’s really worth thinking about, too. 

There’s redemptive mistakes. A redemptive mistake would be a mistake that you make when you go out and try to do something. You think, ok, I’m going to try to do this, and you’re not good at it. You make a bunch of mistakes. What’s the consequence, if you pay attention? You’re not quite so stupid anymore. That’s the thing: you’ve been informed by the results of your errors. What happens is you follow the beacon; you follow the light, and you’re blind, so you don’t know where the light is. It’s dimly apprehended, only, and you’re afraid to follow it. But you decide to take some stumbling steps towards it, and, as you take stumbling steps towards it, you become illuminated and enlightened and informed because of the nature of your experience, and because you’re pushing yourself beyond where you are; you’re going into the country that you have not yet been in. You learn something. What happens, then, is the star moves. You move 10 feet towards it, and you think, no, that’s not right. I didn’t get it right. It isn’t there; it’s actually there. So then you see it somewhere else, and you shift yourself slightly. You move forward.