Are your best ideas hiding in mistakes you are too afraid to make?

being playful resilience rowena cade swapping perfection for progress Feb 20, 2022

On first sight, I thought I was looking at a pile of rock

– the ocean backdrop so hypnotic with it’s crashing waves, the cliffs so mesmerising it was hard to see the iconic outdoor theatre

And yet – there in full sight was the Minack theatre, the extraordinary legacy of Rowena Cade. The story of how this rocky Cornish headland transformed into a world-famous theatre is a story of one woman’s creative vision, fearless dedication, and sheer hard graft

Rowena Cade was born in 1893 and moved to Cornwall where she built her home, Minack house on the Minack headland, following World War 1 and the death of her father

Rowena was passionate about theatre and offered her garden to a local production company who wanted to stage Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’. To help them, she decided to create a stage and somewhere for people to sit. What is incredible, is that Rowena didn’t use heavy machinery to create the seating area and the stage, she and her gardener - Billy Rawlings - used hand tools and the odd stick of dynamite, manhandling rocks to create the first terraces in the sheer cliffs. Rowena and Billy kept going in all weathers - mistakes an essential part of the process of creation. When bits of boulder fell into the sea as they were split, they adapted their design to include the new shape. With each challenge the weather and cliff threw at them and each new performance, mistakes and adaptation inspired new ideas and approaches. Together they created the theatre we can see today from stones, boulders and a concrete mixed with sand which Rowena herself carried up the cliffs from the beach below in sacks

“I had never worked with stones but I was willing to try, so I helped out my gardener Billy. We built ninety steps from the beach to the site to carry the sand up from the Beach” said Rowena

Rowena etched lettering and Celtic designs into the wet concrete with a screwdriver, continuing to build and adapt the theatre even into her 80s

As Philip Johnston wrote in the Telegraph in 2013,

"All who go there should look around, and remember the extraordinary woman who almost single-handedly fashioned this marvel from the cliff-face"

What Rowena saw in the side of a cliff was an opportunity to create something special – a solution to the problem of no theatre. What she didn’t do – was falter for fear of making a mistake. Despite the uncertainty of World War 2, the perils of the weather, and the challenges of working on a cliff – she kept going, making mistakes and adapting her theatre along the way

So for us, today, drained by the endless uncertainty of our current reality, the lolling and the languishing, the constant feeling of being out of control, bored of being afraid, and ready to move on - the free-spirited, resilient Rowena is a great inspiration

The good news is, as we look around we too can see the opportunity for also doing great things, at work, at home in our whole life. Technology democratises opportunity. Small business start-ups, new in demand skills, new innovation projects, new ways of living - are all possible clifftops ripe for the carving

Yet the stakes are high. It takes a truly resilient mind-set to actually jump into some of these opportunities, having spent so much time in the should we/shouldn’t we, masks/not masks world of today. The fear of making mistakes often holds many of us back

The thing about mistakes is that the very nature of them not being planned or logical can lead us to ideas and solutions which we have never thought of, they are disruptive and off-track – which can be incredibly powerful

In fact hidden amongst some of our biggest mistakes, are often some of our greatest ideas – waiting to be blasted into the daylight

Embracing the unknown in a bid to discover new things is what we naturally do as children, so we would all do well to regain the curiosity, determination and wonder we all had as children, allowing more room for trial and error so we can have a play and see what we can discover

Jamie Oliver has a great expression,

"40% of what I have done was a mistake I now call it R&D"

So how do we actually do this? Become more resilient and see mistakes as positive?

The great news is to help us do this, Jo has identified 5 self-resilient mind-sets – mind-sets that help us navigate life's hard knocks, difficulties, missteps and mistakes so we can bounce back and Be Playful, creating new ideas, delivering new projects, starting new start-ups!

We share the content and tools and also how you can adopt and apply them to your own life, in our Being Playful Upskill (our name for a course or masterclass)