As with life, so it is with fishing: you have good days and bad days. On a good day, the sun is shining, the wind is calm, your lure or fly lands exactly where you were aiming, a hungry fish gobbles it up, and after a valiant fight (including a dramatic flip or two out of the water) you land it successfully, easily unhook it, and let it swim away. And this happens again and again. That’s a good day. Then there are days where everything goes wrong. The wind is up and it starts raining as you discover that your jacket leaks. Your rod snaps or a part to your reel falls off and disappears in fifty feet of water. You slip off a log and fall into the water with your phone in your pocket. And, needless to say, you don’t catch any fish. On average, I have more good fishing days than bad ones, and as I get to be a better angler the ratio increases in favor of the good. But I still have plenty of disappointing days catching no fish — in fact, I had one today — and every once in a while I have a spectacularly bad day. Yet I keep fishing, because sometimes the day turns around and, if it doesn’t, there’s always tomorrow.
When devising tactics with activists, we try and encourage them to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how ridiculous or impossible. We do this to break the tendency that many activists have of settling on the first idea they come up with, putting all their efforts into it, and then getting disappointed if it doesn’t work out as planned. When brainstorming a multitude of ideas, invariably, many of them are pretty bad. That’s OK. My frequent collaborator Steve Lambert puts it this way: imagine a field of ideas, both good and bad. We’d like to imagine ourselves walking through that field only picking up the good news while discarding the bad ones. But that’s not how it works. It’s more like a conveyer belt where a good idea comes after a bad one after a couple of good ones and then a few bad ones, and you have to work on them all. Sometimes a bad idea, when worked upon for a while, becomes a good one. Once, when we were working with activist veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on a campaign to extend health benefits, someone suggested an armed takeover of the Veteran’s Administration. Thankfully, the violent insurrection was quickly rejected but it became the prompt for another idea: instead of an armed takeover, they came up with the idea of erecting a tent in the parking lot outside the VA building and creating a temporary clinic that would perform the services they wanted but weren’t getting. As a tactic that would demonstrate their demands within the demonstration itself it was a really good idea, but without the original bad idea, it never would have happened. What matters is having a lot of ideas and working through them all.