Other Druthers

If you had to give up either talking or chewing from now on, which would you pick? Food through a straw for the rest of your life on the one hand; never uttering another word for the rest of your life on the other.

It’s time for some other druthers.

Druthers is a game I played for the first time while visiting Brazil, and the name is derived from the opening line of every question: would you rather…? These “would you rather” questions set up some random comparisons you might not normally make, and I couldn’t get enough of this game.

If you want to read the whole story of how I came to start playing this game, along with speculation about why it’s useful to play, you can open this in a new tab for later:

Today, we’re just going to look at a few of these brain-benders, and since I played this game so much during my last visit to Brazil, I’ll include a few pictures from my trips down south. Pardon the potato-cam quality; many of these were taken with disposable or very cheap digital cameras.

At De La Riva’s Academy in Brazil with my friend and instructor Eric

Would you rather visit a country where you don’t speak the language, but the food is amazing, or where you know the language well and the food is awful? I adored the food during my first visit to Brazil, where I was accosted by the cops and knew just barely enough Portuguese to keep myself from being kidnapped and imprisoned like other jiu jitsu competitors in Brazil during the mid-2000s.

The food in Italy was also great, but I spoke even less Italian during that visit than the Portuguese I had attempted in Brazil. Nevertheless, I discovered that virtually every merchant spoke a little English, and as long as nobody was a dick, they were always very cool and helpful.

Would you rather do karaoke in a dive bar in another country, or shovel manure for eight hours? I’m not sure if that’s a good druther or not—it really depends on you, doesn’t it?

2005 in São Paolo

Would you rather take a six hour bus ride from Rio de Janeiro to São Paolo, in a place where you don’t speak the language—or walk from downtown Rome to the Vatican (about an hour’s walk) and back in the summer? I know which one I would choose, but if walking isn’t your natural state or if you have physical limitations, maybe the bus is a less painful option.

All of these druthers create a side-by-side comparison that isn’t usually made. While it might seem trivial to compare things like chewing and talking, it forces you just a little outside of your thinking comfort zone. You want to spend a little time each day here, feeling just a little uncomfortable and challenged.

This is the nuts and bolts of polymathic thinking—grabbing things from one domain and applying them to another. Instead of copying another artist’s work, you can look to other media and industries and sectors where other ideas might apply to your idea, but through an entirely different lens.

Maybe you like how a musical artist plays a sequence backwards at the end, creating a sense of audial symmetry. You decide to include some bookended symmetry in your visual piece, and you try to replicate a similar feeling across a different medium. Taking another idea and applying it somewhere else can be one of the most valuable tools in your box.

Would you rather visit a favela in Brazil, or get a sunburn on the beach? I know which one I chose, thankfully, and you can read about that here:

Now it’s your turn! Dive deep and across platforms and sectors with your thinking. What’s your best druther for the day? Maybe you’re already wrestling with a complex topic like this; now’s your chance to show off a little and turn that into some fun: