Here's to the Crazy Ones, the Unreasonable People

When Steve Jobs launched Apple’s iconic “Think Different” marketing campaign in 1997, it was clearly a reflection of his own philosophy and ideals. He praised “the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.” Nobody would disagree that Jobs himself personified this category, along with the famous individuals who were featured in Apple’s ads, such as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Sir Richard Branson, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Ted Turner, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso.

By their nature, radical innovators tend to be contrarians, heretics, revolutionaries. They are forever discontent with the status quo. They are people who challenge conventional thinking, who show no respect for rules, or precedent, or popular opinion, and who never accept “can’t be done.” They dare to defy the deepest-held dogmas, dispute the most established industry practices, and trash the proudest of institutional legacies. Where everyone else seems content to “zig,” they feel compelled to “zag” – to swim against the mainstream, contradict prevailing wisdom, break the accepted patterns, slaughter the sacred cows, question the unquestionable, fix things that “ain’t broke,” turn the seemingly impossible into the possible, and, well… to simply “think different.”

Innovators are not satisfied just playing the game. They have an irresistible itch to rethink it, to change it, to improve it. Or to invent an entirely new game. They are, as George Bernard Shaw once explained, unreasonable people. Shaw argued that “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Rather than conform to the existing patterns of the world, innovators can intuitively see what is wrong with those patterns – where others cannot – and they instinctively want to put them right, or to replace them with their own patterns. They quite literally want to change the world.

In a 1994 interview conducted by the Silicon Valley Historical Association, Steve Jobs said the following: “When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much… That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that it – everything around you that you call ‘life’… you can change it, you can influence it… you can mould it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, verses embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Jobs summed it up very well. Innovators don’t just accept that “the world is the way it is.” They are always driven to reshape it into the way they envision it could be. Innovators behave exactly as those “Think Different” ads said they do: “They invent. They imagine… They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Renaissance Innovators who Challenge Orthodoxies (Nonconformists Wins)

Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when we think about Renaissance innovators is their contrarian spirit. It was a time when people began to ask sceptical questions that had never been asked before, and to challenge deeply entrenched beliefs that had long been taken for granted. For examples:

Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler asked:

“What if the Earth is not the centre of the Universe? What if it revolves around the Sun along with the other planets?”

Martin Luther asked:

“What if the papacy and the dogma of the Roman Catholic church are actually wrong? And what if we could read the Bible and listen to sermons in our own language, instead of in Latin?”

Petrarch asked:

“What if a person can achieve great things in this world without being ungodly? What if God wants us to use the intellectual and creative powers he gave us to their fullest potential?”

Andreas Vesalius asked:

“What if the dominant theories of human anatomy that have been unassailable for a thousand years are fully misguided? What if the human body functions completely differently than we have been taught? And what if we started dissecting some dead bodies to find out the truth?”

Paracelsus asked:

“What if everything we know about medicine is nonsense? What if certain chemicals and minerals, used in the right dosage, would be a far better way to cure illnesses than traditional practices? What if nature could teach us more about medicine than ancient books from Greece and Rome?”

Machiavelli asked:

“What if politics has nothing to do with theology or morality? What if it’s simply about using all means – fair and foul – to retain power?”

Descartes asked:

“What if all of our traditional systems of thinking, most of which are founded upon Aristotle’s ideas, are false? What if we set out to build a new philosophical system from the group up, by first doubting everything we think we know?”

Isaac Newton asked:

“What if conventional concepts of physics, gravity, and motion are inconsistent with reality? What if we need new laws and mathematical models for understanding mechanics?”

Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti asked:

“Why can’t a painting be less like wall decoration and more like a window into the nature world? What if we used mathematical and optional principles to imitate objects so accurately that they look entirely real?”

Christopher Columbus asked:

“What if we could get to the East Indies much faster by sailing west instead of east and circumnavigating the globe?”

Amerigo Vespucci asked:

“What if the Earth has a much larger circumference that we learned from Ptolemy’s cartography? What if these lands Columbus has newly discovered are not the Indies at all, but in fact another whole continent – a New World?”

Almost by definition, the Renaissance revolutionaries were nonconformists who were willing to contest previously held truths – beliefs and assumptions that had been accepted as absolute truth for perhaps a thousand years or more – and to reinvent their worldview completely from scratch. Many of them were branded as heretics or lunatics. Yet their propensity to break the chains of precedent and to challenge conventional thinking became the basis for a whole string of breakthrough discoveries and new philosophies that literally changed our world.

[Questions are taken from The 4 Lenses of Innovation (2015) by Rowan Gibson. Title mine]

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Change Your Life: No Success without Risk and Failure

“If you want to increase your success rate,

double your failure rate”
(Thomas Watson)

When we hear about extremely successful people, we mostly hear about their great accomplishments – not about the many mistakes they made and the failures they experienced along the way. In fact, most successful people throughout history are also those who have had the most failures. That is no coincidence. People who achieve great feats, no matter in what field, understand that failure is not a stumbling block but a stepping-stone on the road to success. These is no success without risk and failure. We often fail to see this truth because the outcome is more visible than the process – we see the final success and not the many failures that led to it.

When I acknowledge that fulfilling my God-given potential must involve some failure, I no longer run away from risks and challenges. The choice is a simple one: Learn to fail, or fail to learn.

Thomas Edison had 1,093 patents registered to his name – more than any other person in history! And while he most certainly deserves a place of honour in the science hall of fame, he also deserves honorary membership in the “failure hall of fame” for the tens of thousands of experiments he conducted that failed. Edison himself, however, did not see these experiments as failures. When he was working on one of his inventions, a storage battery, someone pointed out to him that he had failed ten thousand times. “I have not failed,” responded Edison, “I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” Recognizing the real path to his accomplishments, Edison remarked, “I failed my way to success.”

Don’t avoid making mistakes by not trying,

Learn from failure.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

How to Maximizing a New Idea

Danny Cox write in his book Seize the Day, “Even as new ideas are being developed, their horizons should be stretched. The world is full of useful products that resulted from attempts to solve problems that had nothing to do with the idea’s ultimate application. Part of remaining open to new ideas is to remain open to new applications. In finding broader or different applications for new ideas, you can also recruit support from other sectors that wouldn’t have had any previous reason to be involved.” Then he outlines few questions that we should ask ourselves about the new idea:

Can the idea be put to uses other than the use it was originally designed for?

Can the idea be modified in any way?

Can the idea be reduced in scale or expanded?

Can the idea be upgraded?

Can the idea be substituted?

Can the idea be rearranged?

Can the idea be reversed?

Can the idea be combined with another idea?

Then before you launched your new idea, ask also the following questions.  These questions are helpful guide to making a go or not go decision on a new idea:

Does the new idea make better use of most peoples’ time, talent and energy?

Does the idea improve operations or product quality?

Does the new idea cut waste or unnecessary work?

Does the new idea improve working conditions and customer service?

A new idea doesn’t have to solve the problems of the world to be worth the shot. As long as a creative new concept meets the criteria set forth, it’s a valuable addition to your life. You will always have to use your best judgment and exercise discrimination. That’s simply part of being a responsible person. I know you can do it!

Maximize your idea.

“The answer is out there,” Thomas Edison said, “Find it!”

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Barriers to Creativity #9: "To Err is Wrong"

Creativity, like common sense, is supposed to be common. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. Yet it is not exhibited as frequently as it should. Experts believe that there are several reasons for this. These reasons are called ‘Barriers to Creativity’. ‘Barriers’ are the thing that stop us from thinking creatively and the reason that make us not as creative as we should be.

Barrier #9: “To Err is Wrong”

From a practical standpoint, ‘to err is wrong’ makes sense. (Err means ‘be mistaken’ or ‘incorrect’; ‘make a mistake’). Nevertheless too attached to that belief may undermine our ability to generate new ideas. If we are more concerned with producing the right answers rather than original ideas, then we’ll by-pas the imaginative phrase of creative process. We need to test assumptions and challenge the rules. The creative thinker realizes the potential value of errors. They are stepping-stones to new ideas.

The history of discoveries is filled with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. A large part of creative thinking is not to be afraid to err. We learn from our mistakes.

           

To err is right, sometimes.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

*These 10 barriers to creativity are taken from creativity expert Roger Von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative book. Summaries mine. 

Barriers to Creativity #6: "That's Not My Area"

Creativity, like common sense, is supposed to be common. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. Yet it is not exhibited as frequently as it should. Experts believe that there are several reasons for this. These reasons are called ‘Barriers to Creativity’. ‘Barriers’ are the thing that stop us from thinking creatively and the reason that make us not as creative as we should be.

Barrier #6: “That’s Not My Area”

            Today’s world is one of specialization. Specialists are held in high regard. As a strategy for creative thinking, however, specialization spells “danger” because it leads to the attitude that says “It’s not my area.” When this happens the person not only limits himself or herself to a small area, he or she may also stop looking for ideas in other fields. In creativity, cross-references and diversities are essential. We borrow from any field that can contribute to serves the purpose. We often hear people say, “That is an admin problem” or “I’m sorry, I can’t help you because that is not my area of specialization.”

            Ideas from one field can be used to make discoveries in another. In a brainstorming session, for example, the ideas generated would be much better and wider if the group compromises people from a variety of backgrounds rather than one in which all members are specialists in one particular are. Imagine the kind of ideas we can get if we put engineer, mechanical, business and psychology students together – Wow!

   

As far as creativity concern, be a generalist.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Barriers of Creativity #3: "Follow the Rules"

Creativity, like common sense, is supposed to be common. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. Yet it is not exhibited as frequently as it should. Experts believe that there are several reasons for this. These reasons are called ‘Barriers to Creativity’. ‘Barriers’ are the thing that stop us from thinking creatively and the reason that make us not as creative as we should be.

Barrier #3: “Follow the Rules”

            There is a lot of pressure in our culture to follow the rules. ‘Do not try to be different’; ‘Do what everybody else does’; ‘Uniformity and compliance to rules make society work’; ‘Let’s do things the way they have always been done’; ‘It makes sense’; ‘Do not rock the boat’ etc.

            For creative thinking there is no virtue in doing things the way they have always been done. Creativity means doing things in new and better ways. If we keep doing things the same way we will never improve. Following the rules is a mental block, for we will always think of things as they are not as it can be. Tradition kills creativity. Challenging the rules (there is a limit however. As a Christian, I will not intentionally challenge God's Commandments) is a good creative thinking strategy. Ask these questions: Is this the only way? Is this the best way? Are there better ways?

Challenge the rules.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)