I was going to write a post today on drawing inspiration from nature in design (don’t worry, it’ll show up tomorrow), but I want to talk about something that I’ve been thinking about since last

by The Fayj

night.

Last night Michael and I went to a reception for Davidson College, where we did our undergraduate work.  It was a reception for highschool students who live in the Metro DC area and are contemplating applying to Davidson. As part of the reception, the alumni there (7 of us), spoke a little bit about our experiences at Davidson and how it has helped us since we’ve moved onto the real world.  Now, for both Michael and I, who love Davidson, have an abiding loyalty, and benefited greatly from going there, so it was hard to choose a simple topic to talk about.  But one thing that kept coming up from different alumni was the idea of intellectual risk.

Risk is a hard thing for me to do.  I’m not naturally a person that likes to leave my safe zone.  Or should I say, I don’t like to take risks without an appropriate level of preparation.  I’m not the type that likes to look before I leap – at least when it comes to important decisions in my life.  But I love to pit myself against a challenge, and I love to dive into something without knowing what the results will be.  Franklin Habit captured it beautifully yesterday when he was talking about his yarn and his hat – I, like him, don’t mind “setting sail without a destination.”

by  avyfain

Which is, I suppose, a sort of intellectual risk.  Believing that you, yourself, have the skills to navigate whatever comes of of the risk – be it success, mistakes or abject failure, is hard.

One of the students at the reception asked if we could elaborate a little on intellectual risk, and how Davidson fosters this quality.  I told him about my 300-level class my senior year, Professor Campbell‘s Memoir class.  Every three weeks or so we were working on a piece of short nonfiction in a different area of memoir.  Towards the end of the second essay, I started to notice a pattern emerging in the stories I was choosing to tell, and I wanted to investigate the theme.

So I went to Dr. Campbell and explained my problem to her: I wanted to write these stories, but I wasn’t sure they would meet the future requirements of the other assignments.  I told her I could use the assignments as inspiration, but I wasn’t sure that by the end of them the piece I had written would match the project requirements.  I asked her if that was okay, because I didn’t want my grade to suffer. (I was not one to let my grade suffer for my art, thankyouverymuch.)

We agreed that my stories would be evaluated based on their own merit as a collection, and not necessarily on the project requirements.  This was terrifying for me.  I no longer would have concrete goals I had to meet.  Instead, these stories had to stand up based on their own artistic merit.  That, to me, was a much harder goal to meet.

Intellectual risk.  Putting your ideas and your self out there for the sake of meeting some higher goal.  At another school the professors might not have been so flexible, might have preferred grading according to the rubric that had been set.  Certainly it created more work from Dr. Campbell.

In the real world – the world outside of the college bubble – risk of certain sorts is inevitable.  Certainly every time I develop a new class, or send out a design proposal or publish a pattern I’m taking a risk – that my time, my money, my thoughts might be wasted or rejected.  And that rejection?  Happens a lot.

But it’s the only way to succeed.

Do you take intellectual risk?  When have you put yourself out there and succeeded… or failed?  I’d like to know. Leave a comment, reply via twitter or facebook.