Shifting from Daydreams to Experiments
What the 21st Century Walter Mitty Urges Us
Between films adapted from books and the original books themselves, which one do you like better? I prefer original books to films in general, but there are two exceptions. The first is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), the movie based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original short story with the same title. Another exception is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), the film based on James Thurber’s original short story from 1939.
In the 1939 original story, James Thurber satirizes how Walter Mitty escapes to the hypermasculine fantasies of his secret life from his humdrum days. He remains largely static in reality, not doing anything beyond daydreaming. Walter Mitty’s desire to try different things and adventures in life is palpable throughout his active daydreaming. Reading the book, I couldn’t stop wondering how it could have been different had he tried something, as it ended with yet another daydream and no action.
The 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, played and directed by Ben Stiller, expands on the original story. Walter Mitty works at Life magazine, which is expected to publish the last print issue before it goes digital 100 percent. Like in the original story, Mitty’s life is monotonous and dull. As a negative asset manager of all the photography films for Life, his job is about to become extinct in the new era of digital media. He daydreams a lot about different lives he admired but assumed unreachable for himself.
For example, he dreams of becoming those daring photographers who captured incredible moments in the wild for the magazine, even risking their lives. But in reality, he cannot even sign up for an online dating service because he couldn’t fill out the “Been There” and “Done That” sections of his dating profile. Up to this point, it feels quite similar to the original story, but the 2013 movie takes quite a creative spin into a very different direction from the original. When Mitty has to find the missing negative for the magazine’s final cover, he embarks on the unexpected adventures for it. His daydreams come to life, and Walter Mitty undergoes significant self-transformation as a result.
The biggest difference between these two versions of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the actions Walter Mitty takes based on his daydreams in the film. In one scene of the movie, Mitty imagines the photographer waves to him to join his adventure. Dramatically, as it should be for a movie, Mitty walks out the door from his office without hesitation and flies straight to Greenland, where his first adventure begins. For the rest of the film, no more division is present between his daydreams and reality. Daydreams become reality, and reality embodies daydreams. Many things go wrong and way too many unexpected things happen against his expectation, but he tries them all. When he comes back to his seemingly uneventful life again from his adventures, he is no longer the same Walter Mitty.
He changed forever.
While James Thurber’s Walter Mitty daydreamed only throughout his life and stayed miserable in reality, Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty did not stop with daydreaming only; he engaged in his daydreams by testing them out. Thurber’s Walter Mitty felt trapped in the humdrum of his life because he had just daydreamed about different identities. That would explain the satirical and unhappy tone of the story. Stiller’s Walter Mitty could have been stuck with his mundane job, but he tried out things he was daydreaming about—searching for the photographer using bits of clues on the road in spite of many accidents, meeting all kinds of interesting people he wouldn’t have met, and daring to go to dangerous places such as the Himalayas or Iceland with erupting volcanoes.
For Stiller’s Walter Mitty, daydreaming worked as a divergent thinking to ideate, and his active engagement with different adventures were his experiments. That made his daydreaming a positive experience.
In the Placeholder, it doesn’t mean you have to quit your job now and get on the boldest adventures right away, as Stiller’s Mitty did. The call to action here is to experiment your ideas like a mad scientist, however small they might be. You can start by experimenting with the smallest ideas and move on with more novel and bolder ideas as you keep going on.
As you iterate these experiments, you will learn something new and bring those insights back into learning for your next experiments. This process will help you filter out an idea or two as a prototype that you really want to pursue as your new career. Unlike in the movie, this process of experiments doesn’t happen overnight or over a few days. It may take a couple of months or years to create a prototype you feel so aligned with based on values that matter to you and you are excited about.
Yet, it can happen.
Curious About How to Shift from Daydreaming to Experimenting?
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