This audio file – Young at Heart: How to Be an Innovator for Life presents five core practices that enhance creativity. Through entertaining stories and examples, Tom Kelley (general manager at the world-renowned design firm, IDEO) describes how these techniques help us all become more innovative in every aspect of our lives and lead to more success. The five practices were summarized by Jens Schumacher as:
- Think Like a Traveler
- Treat Life as an Experiment
- Nurture the Attitude of Wisdom
- Use your Brain and your Tortoise Mind
- Follow your Passions
- Circle 1: What are you good at?
- Circle 2: What are you born to do?
- Circle 3: What would people pay you to do?
It’s important to keep in mind what you are good at. However, just because you are good at something doesn’t mean that this is the only thing you can do in life.
Some people are the happiest when they solve equations or dig in the depth of the Java source code and find out how every class is implemented. People have a good idea about what they are good at. But it’s harder to figure out what you are born to do. I would suggest simply start by keeping track of the activities you enjoyed the most during the week. Why not spend 30 minutes on Sunday to reflect about the week and recall what made you happy, what you really enjoyed doing.
The last question, and therefore the last circle is…Playing computer games is something I was pretty good at, and something I loved doing… but it is hard to find someone to pay you for it. I know, today you can probably find someone to pay for anything you do… even sleeping. And I am pretty good at that as well.
When you travel to a foreign country you become more aware of the things that are happening around you. You observe your environment in more detail and you switch off the auto-pilot that takes you through every day life.
Turn up the traveler part of your brain to capture the deep and up to date knowledge of what is happening around you.
In order to succeed, you will have to fail. Unfortunately failure is being seen as undesirable in our society. However, people forget that most innovations are preceded by a number of failures. For example the famous WD40 oil formula got it’s name from the number of formulas that didn’t work. 39 different formulas were tried and dismissed before the company arrived at the final product that made the “Water Displacement 40” such a huge success.
Treat life as an experiment. It is ok to fail as long a you learn your lesson and move on.
“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it is what you know for sure that ain’t so.”
Best Buy lost one billion dollars in 2005 when MusicLand, which was acquired by best buy in 2001, went bankrupt. The executives at Best Buy thought they knew the market well enough to make the decision to buy MusicLand without conducting enough research beforehand. Unfortunately they failed to see that CD sales were already slowing down in the beginning of the century, and more and more people downloaded music from the web. They completely ignored what was happening around them.
Distrust what you know just enough to keep searching. Resting on your laurels is never a good idea.
The tortoise mind is a subconscious mind that works in the backgrounds on problems and thoughts you are having. Researchers found that ingenious ideas that seem to come like a lightning bolt to ones mind are in fact the result of the tortoise mind working away in the background for days, weeks, month or even years, and the “aha” moment is simply the crossing of the finishing line. However the tortoise mind can only operate if it gets some processing time, time in which you aren’t listing to music, reading a book or solving crossword puzzles. Time to day-dream. Therefore keep your iPod turned off once a while when you are headed home to turn up your own creative powers and engage the tortoise mind.
It is easy. If you don’t follow your passion you will not be successful in what you are doing. If you are trying to think about what to do next, think about it in three circles:
And of course there is one more thing.
Who?
Who are you going to work with?
Bottom Line
The supreme achievement in life should be: Blur the line between work and play!
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