The Accidental Genius of a Mangy Gorilla Truck

So I’m driving along today and glance in my rearview mirror. There’s a truck behind me and, with my 60-year-old eyesight, it appears to be... furry. Or possibly covered in moss. Honestly, at this point either seemed plausible. I chalked it up to the fact that I can’t see anything anymore, turned my attention back to my music, and kept driving.

A couple blocks later, the truck pulls up next to me. Nope. My eyes were fine. The truck was actually covered in black fur.

The business logo on the side had the word Gorilla in it, so clearly there had once been a vision here. I’m guessing when that truck first rolled out, it looked amazing. Shiny black fur, bold logo, full gorilla theme. Somebody was standing there thinking, This is marketing genius!

What I’m fairly certain nobody considered was rain or dirt, or dust, or literally anything else that happens to a vehicle in the real world. Because this poor truck now looked less like a powerful gorilla and more like a stuffed animal that had been dragged around by a toddler for the better part of a decade. The fur was matted. It was dirty. It was going in directions fur should not go.

I had one passing thought, Well... that didn’t work out like he thought it was going to. That should have been the end of it. Except it wasn’t.

Because I could NOT stop thinking about that stupid truck. How do you wash it? Can you take a furry truck through a car wash? Does someone shampoo it? Is there conditioner involved? Do you have to blow-dry a truck? Seriously, HOW MUCH DID THIS MAN PAY TO PUT FUR ON AN ENTIRE VEHICLE?

I actually started to feel bad for him. But then, two days later, it hit me. That mangy truck was freaking brilliant.

Maybe it didn’t turn out anything like he pictured. Maybe somewhere there’s a rendering of a sleek, gorgeous, shiny gorilla truck and reality has taken a very different path. But here I am, two days later, still thinking about his truck. More importantly, I remember the name of his business.

If a perfectly clean white truck had driven past me with a tasteful logo on the door, I wouldn’t have given it another thought. But the dirty, matted, possibly-in-need-of-a-groomer Gorilla truck? I’m writing an entire blog post about it.

So when I had that aha moment about the mangy gorilla truck, I started thinking about what happens when we get what we think is a great idea.

You know that feeling. You get excited. You can see it in your head. For about five glorious minutes, you are absolutely convinced you are a freaking genius. Then you tell someone.

Are you sure you want to do that? I don’t know if that will work. Have you thought about how much that will cost?

Honestly, we don’t even need other people to do it for us because we’re REALLY good at doing it to ourselves. Who are you to think you can pull that off? You don’t have the time. You don’t know enough. You don’t have the money. There are more important things you should be doing.

Just like that, this thing that had us excited five minutes ago starts sounding a little ridiculous. So we talk ourselves right out of it. We put it aside. We tell ourselves maybe someday. Eventually, we leave that great idea sitting in the dust.

But what if that idea is the mangy gorilla truck?

What if it actually IS freaking genius?

What if it doesn’t turn out anything like you envisioned? What if the shiny black fur gets dirty and matted and the whole thing ends up looking slightly ridiculous? What if it still works?

What if the part you thought was the failure ends up being the exact thing that makes it memorable?

I have no idea if that guy’s truck looks anything like what he originally imagined. I’m guessing probably not. But I do know this: two days later, some random woman who drove past him is still thinking about it, remembers his business name, and is now writing about his truck on the internet.

So maybe the lesson isn’t that every crazy idea is a good one. Maybe it’s that we need to stop killing our ideas before we ever get the chance to find out. Because what if?

Suddenly I realized there was a pretty great lesson buried under all that filthy fake fur. Sometimes the thing that doesn’t turn out the way you planned still does exactly what it was supposed to do.

Plot twist… maybe the ideas that look a little ridiculous are the ones worth keeping.