This is why going to the source is far better than copying others...
Category Everything else
I ran across two blog entries in the last couple of days that are quite revealing...
A Sequence Of Circles Traced By 500 Individuals
A Sequence Of Lines Traced By 500 Individuals
In these two videos, Clement Valla used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to have 500 individuals use their mouse to trace a simple pattern... a straight line and a circle. But instead of each person tracing from the original source drawing, they did their tracing from the person just before them. So each tracing was the tracing of a copy. As time elapses in the videos, you see how the shape gets more and more distorted with each tracing, finally ending up in something that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original.
What an apt metaphor of life...
We can attempt to be someone or to follow a plan by looking to the source or by following others. But by following a copy, we will end up incorporating all the errors and flaws, both known and unknown, that have been introduced with each passing cycle or generation. And what's worse is that others following us will add *our* errors to their attempts along the way, making the deviation from the original ever wider.
This is a good reminder to me... in whatever I do, strive to get as close to the original, as close to the source, as possible. It may not look like what everyone else is doing or interpreting the "correct" way to be, but the result in my life will be infinitely closer to what I intended.
I ran across two blog entries in the last couple of days that are quite revealing...
A Sequence Of Circles Traced By 500 Individuals
A Sequence Of Lines Traced By 500 Individuals
In these two videos, Clement Valla used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to have 500 individuals use their mouse to trace a simple pattern... a straight line and a circle. But instead of each person tracing from the original source drawing, they did their tracing from the person just before them. So each tracing was the tracing of a copy. As time elapses in the videos, you see how the shape gets more and more distorted with each tracing, finally ending up in something that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original.
What an apt metaphor of life...
We can attempt to be someone or to follow a plan by looking to the source or by following others. But by following a copy, we will end up incorporating all the errors and flaws, both known and unknown, that have been introduced with each passing cycle or generation. And what's worse is that others following us will add *our* errors to their attempts along the way, making the deviation from the original ever wider.
This is a good reminder to me... in whatever I do, strive to get as close to the original, as close to the source, as possible. It may not look like what everyone else is doing or interpreting the "correct" way to be, but the result in my life will be infinitely closer to what I intended.
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Posted by Phil Salm At 20:02:44 On 23/02/2011 | - Website - |
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