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)
