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. (It does NOT mean ‘to vacillate.’) To vacilar, Steinbeck says, is to go on a mission without obsessing about its outcome. To be vacilando is to be purposeful in your travels without sweating your destination.
Steinbeck wrote that a friend of his taught him to get vacilando by looking for something almost certain not to exist wherever you’re looking for it– fishing hats in Mexico City, a jai alai cesta in Anchorage or person in Dublin with no opinions.
To the left brain, this will seem like a big waste of time, a fool’s errand, but to the right brain, it’s pure liberation. You never know what may turn up along the way or what useful new connection you will make. Once again, vacilar 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 is a great game 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 explorations or accidents (the name ‘Google’ was an accidental misspelling of ‘googol.’) that yield unexpectedly rich outcomes.
Once, as I was explaining the Vacilar Game ame in a GameChangers workshop at NYU’s Stern School of Business, a smart student hit me with this question: “Why don’t you just Google what you’re looking for?”
It is a relevant question: In the age of Google, has the vacilar concept become obsolete? It triggers a whole lot of sub-questions:
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 media-rich time-shifted virtual world gained an edge in our attention over plain old everyday reality and physical experience?
Has the augmented become more valuable real estate than the real reality?
Are we at the dawn of an age, literally a ‘second life,’ in which we’ll never again dance with anyone in person whose avatar we have not tangoed 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 all dolled up on her wedding day, that’s your prerogative.
It’s just that you’ll be missing the romance of the journey.
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. His is a discplined approach to creating unexpected connections. For photos that do not exist until he takes them, and relationships that do not exist until the ‘game’ of his journey 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 an outdated game, that maybe it had been rendered irrelevant by Google’s algorithms, and would have to be stricken from the GameChangers lexicon. And then I came to my senses. In an outcomes-obsessed culture, the Vacilar Game has never been more relevant!
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.
To solve a problem, go where the problem isn’t.
In the Vacilar Game, 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 
