John Steinbeck and Charley
There is a passage early in John Steinbeck’s book Travels With Charley that I often cite in GameChangers workshops, where he writes about a Spanish verb, vacilar, which he claims has no equivalent in English. (Despite what Babelfish says, it does not mean to vacillate.) To vacilar, Steinbeck says, is to travel with a sense of direction without greatly caring whether you get there or not. To be vacilando is to be purposeful in your travels without sweating your destination too much.
A friend of Steinbeck’s told him that the way to attain this state is to go looking for something almost certain not to exist wherever you’re looking for it– a jai alai cesta in Anchorage or a bar patron in Dublin who doesn’t want to talk politics, for example. To the left brain, this will seem like a big waste of time, but to the right brain, it’s pure liberation. You never know what may turn up along the way or what kind of beneficial experience you may have. This is not to say that vacilar is a recipe for randomness. It does not mean vacillating. Quite the opposite. It imposes discipline upon one’s journey. A sense of purpose and the nature of one’s inquiry trigger one’s discoveries, whatever they are.
Vacilar, I have often claimed, is a good process for creativity, innovation and problem solving. You do not have to get to a stated destination to have forged a new path. Business is awash in success stories, from synthetic rubber to Post-It Notes to Google, that resulted from unexpected explorations. Our friend, the animation director, Bill Kroyer, likes to say that if you want to solve a problem, the best way is to look a hundred eighty degrees opposite of where the problem is. To paraphrase Kroyer, to find a solution, go to where the problem isn’t.
Last month, as I was waxing on about this concept to a group of NYU business students in a GameChangers workshop when one of them hit me with this comment: “Why don’t you just Google what you’re looking for?”
Wow. Quite a reversal this B-schooler laid on me. It posed a good question: In the age of Google, has the vacilar concept become obsolete?
Have we become so menu-driven and search-reliant that if we can’t find evidence of a thing’s existence (and website and location and customer rating) online we won’t even bother to go looking for it in the real world? Have the metaverse and the universe switched places, so that if an object doesn’t exist in cyberspace it will cease to exist altogether, like Marty McFly’s family evaporating from the Polaroid picture in Back to the Future? Has the spiced-up, mashed-up virtual world gained an edge in our attention over plain old vanilla physical space? Has the augmentation become more valuable than the reality? Are we at the dawn of an age, literally a ’second life,’ in which we’ll never again encounter anyone in person whose avatar we have not powwowed with first?
If that’s the way you want it, that’s certainly the way you can have it. If you don’t want to leave the house without knowing for a solid fact that what you’re leaving the house for is waiting for you like a bride on her wedding day, that’s your prerogative.
It’s just that you’ll be missing so much of the romance along the way.
Vacilar is why, a few years ago, a team of Honda engineers set themselves up with the task of building a humanoid robot that could run, and walk up and down stairs. Such a robot did not exist. The engineers themselves saw no practical reason, nor did they need one, for it to exist. What they knew is that by ‘getting lost in the problem’ of designing a robot they would, along the way, make all sorts of useful discoveries about the nature of robotics.
Vacilar is why our friend, Taylor Davidson, specializes in what he calls the Science of Serendipity. Davidson’s process, which you could call full-time vacilar, takes him all over the world. He looks for photos that do not exist until he takes them, and relationships that do not exist until he causes them to occur. None of it could be Googled or Mapquested or scripted. He uses technology as an enabler, but not as an endpoint. From a business standpoint, this approach makes no sense except in retrospect, and there’s no time frame on the retrospection.
Photo by Taylor Davidson
For a brief instant in that workshop at NYU, I let myself imagine, darkly, that maybe vacilar was no more, that maybe it had been rendered irrelevant by the marvels of computing, and would have to be stricken from the GameChangers lexicon. And then I came to my senses. Not true. Not true at all. Never less true, in fact.
Life happens when we take the local, not the express. When we are open to what and whom we run into unexpectedly, we make possible what we can’t imagine or bring into being on our own, and find new and productive avenues for expressing ourselves in the world.
Getting lost is the first step toward discovering what no search engine can find.
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.
One of the greatest gifts of my professional life has been 
