Mere competence cannot surpass mediocrity, no matter how perfectly it achieves its goals.

This is because mediocrity conceives of excellence in negative terms: as an absence of flaws.

Excellence, however, is a positive matter, and it consists in the presence of something valuable.

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The frank display of flaws can be a way to flaunt excellence.

The excellent, despite being deeply problematic or grossly distorted, is always preferable to those things about which nothing bad nor good can be said.

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Many romantic relationships persist unhappily for the sole reason that nobody produce a flaw sufficiently terrible to justify it.

Thwarted fault-finding produces even deeper contempt than successful fault-finding.

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Mere competence results from seeing only the commonplace, commonsense questions.

The questions are barely even noticed. Usually they are simply taken to be self-evident — implied by reality itself.

All effort is put into re-answering the questions a little better than last time. With each recitation, the answer is tweaked, refined, polished, paraphrased, flavored or garnished a little differently — but the answer is substantially the same, which is why it finds easy recognition.

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Innovation doesn’t come from inventing better answers; it comes from discovering better questions.

Few people seem to know how to discover new questions, and this has much to do with the aversion most people have to the conditions necessary for finding them. People go about things in ways that actively prevent new questions from arising. Everything presupposes the validity of the old questions, and reinforces re-asking and expert re-telling.

We don’t actually love the old questions and we’re not really that enamored with the answers we produce. We only like the predictability of it all.

But is it that we hate new questions? Actually, no. As a matter of fact, once a new question is posed clearly, people love it. The essence of inspiration is feeling the existence of a new question.

What people really hate is the space between the old and new question — the space called “perplexity”, that condition where we are deeply bothered and disoriented by a something we can’t really point to or explain. We cannot even orient ourselves enough to ask a question.

This is the space Wittgenstein claimed for philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.'”

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How do we enter perplexity? By conversing with others and allowing them to teach us how their understanding differs from our own. What they teach us is how to ask different questions than we’d ordinarily think to ask. But before we can hear the questions they are asking –usually tacitly asking — we to quiet our own questions. (Interrogations are only good for getting answers out of people.)

How do we avoid perplexity? By not allowing the other to speak. Instead we observe their behaviors, look for patterns, impose different conditions and look for changes. We may feel puzzled by the behaviors we see, but we can answer this puzzlement by trying out one answer after another until one turns out good enough, like a child trying to hit upon the correct multiple choice answer to a math problem without really understanding the material.

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It appears that generative research has gone out of style. There’s a widespread belief that assembling a frankenstein of best practices parts and subsequently using analytics to detect and correcting all the flaws will somehow produce the same results, but more cheaply and reliably — and less harrowingly.

But, here’s the question: Can anyone produce even one example where tweaking transformed something boring into something compelling?

And then consider how many times you’ve watched something compelling tweaked to mediocrity.