A fool would usually pull with it all sorts of connotations and is the one you laugh at, not with but at, his only purpose being to entertain kings and make them feel better about themselves by sacrificing dignity for cheap laughs. We see fools as people who lost their honor and destroy the image the world had of them as dignified individuals. Loss of dignity is associated with shame due to lack of skill, competence or control, but we still laugh because no matter how bad it gets for us the fool is always worse.

Yet, the fool is a necessary step towards mastery. There will be things in life you’ll try for the first time and you will completely suck at them. You’ll stumble around as a true fool making mistakes and collecting laughs and pity along the way. Keep on doing that and tune out the laughs because fools and idiots are precursors to masters. Master is a fool that kept going and learned through nature’s best teaching tool until you get it right – trial and error – and there will be trials and the process is an error ridden labyrinth. A lot of your ideas will be stupid, most of them will be, and getting it right the first time is pretty much impossible (or it is a pure fluke that you can’t reproduce again). A lot of your tries will be inadequate due to inexperience but if you keep going you’ll start to see something happen. As time passes the mistakes will lessen because doing it badly is better than not at all and even if you’re still not quite sure how to do it right you are clearer on how not to do it, so the loops of trial and error slowly calibrate the goal.

Practicing and falling is better than standing still with unscarred knees. There is no book or talk that can teach you as good as feeling it on your own skin, it’s like straightening yourself out through the spin, like a funnel with a marble in it, going round the edges, and speeding up as the circumference of the membrane gets smaller and smaller and closer to the tip of the funnel where the ball will be still – from massive deviation to exponentially better aim for the bullseye. It’s ok to wander around stupidly; it’s completely ok, it’s necessary. Fools before masters!