It’s a Good Time to Reiterate That Sometimes, Naivety Is Good

The other day, I was watching a video explaining a comic book storyline where the ideals of an older person clashed with that of a younger one. It was an alternate Spider-man reality in a very corrupt world and a young Peter Parker having so much rage about the injustice of the world and having very simple politics.

Here's the video for the comic fans interested.

The older person typically has been beat down in life. The hope in their eyes has gone and they deal with everything with a sense of strict practicality. The young person sees life through a very simple lens. They have the inexperience to think that they can solve the problems without stopping to realise that they won't be the first to think about it and without asking why those solutions never worked till now.

But the irony of it is that youthful naivety is why things happen. Throughout history, a lot of freedom fighters, political figures, effectors of change were relatively young. They had the inexperience to think that they could actually do something about it. And somehow, they did, despite the older people of their time complaining about "children of nowadays".

And beyond serious things like wars and revolutions, we also have businesses. People silly enough to think that out of all the people who have tried and failed, theirs would be different. Oblivious to the fact that most businesses fail in general, before even considering unchartered territory like unexplored markets.

I think that in a weird way, people with such audacity tend to be rewarded. Of course, there are so many other factors into play because otherwise, every weird uncle with their 100th business idea would be a millionaire. But I like to see the world beyond the tangible physical as also bound by certain laws of physics. You want something to move, you have to apply force. Sometimes, that force is action. And sometimes, being naive is the igniter to incite action.

Sometimes, your own experience can work against you. Many times (if not most), that's not necessarily a bad thing. We need guardrails. We need to learn, iterate and improve based on things that didn't go our way. But as each of us gets older, the stakes of each decision getting higher, the percieved increasingly reduced margin for error, we need to fight to keep some of our naivety. Fight the typical cynicism that comes with understanding more and more how truly broken the world is. Fight the compulsion to get lost in practicality. Fight to maintain the idea that your own could actually be different.

Your naivety can work with your experience. Be naive enough to think you can and be experienced enough to actually do the work to make what you want to happen, happen. Hopeful enough to think it could be you. Practical enough to not downplay the work. One can help you execute but it's not always enough to see it through.

Or even see it to begin with.