I wonder if there is any life hack or mind hack we could try to overcome this and dive into new complex projects with that child-like enthusiasm, energy and courage that you so well described!
[1] https://designmanifestos.org/bre-pettis-and-kio-stark-2009-t...
Also Technic was revolutionary for me, kudos to your kids.
Thanks for the refreshing comment :)
On the other hand adults work on projects that someone depend on. So those failed dozen times are the type of opportunities not available to them beyond research or personal projects.
"The teenage spirit." There was an interview[1] with one of the founders of Teenage Engineering (makers of the OP-1 synth) that drew from this line of thinking when naming their company:
> They took their name Teenage Engineering from an early prototype that they never launched, but it fits the company and its philosophy well. “The teenage spirit is sometimes about doing things without having any knowledge of how to do them,” he says. “You just do it. That’s often how we go about things. If there’s something we don’t know, say electronics, we learn; we don’t let it stop us. It’s about having more will than knowledge, which is a more rock ’n’ roll way of solving things.”
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220421192821/https://www.sandv...
This.
By now I believe university does at least as much harm as it does good if not more. The good mainly boils down to building up contacts and connections. If you’re able to find a substitute for that, then skip university!
I also have so few free hours that my main concern is, “am I about to waste the 8 hours of hobby time I have this week?” I have this problem in video games too: I don’t want to build a character that might suck. I can’t afford to play this game twice, unlike when I was younger.
I think there’s definitely some level of truth to this fearlessness the “ignorant” have. I mentor a high school robotics team and they prototype things so fast. I think that’s also because the stakes are so low: it’s only thousands of dollars. Nobody is being fired. The competition is for fun.
So in a way, maybe it’s just a rose tinted look at younger people. Maybe they’re more fearless than us not because we lost that trait, but because we gained many more constraints.
There's this tremendous power in "not knowing what you don't know" that sometime in university disappeared from me and now I have paralysis: what if I'm just being annoying? Will I embarrass myself? I don't want to waste people's time. Am I being pedantic? etc.
I've spent the last handful of years refining my communication of, "I'm just trying to be helpful and have absolutely no expectations. No offense taken if this goes ignored or is rejected." It's kind of worked insofar as I feel less anxious about trying to be helpful and I've never had anyone really come at my throat for it. Not that they would have anyways, but good luck telling my brain that.