We are not your enemies
Who want to give ourselves vast strange domains
Where mystery flowers into any hands that long for it
Where there are new fires colors never seen
A thousand fantasies difficult to make sense out of
They must be made real
All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country
where everything is silent
And there is time which somebody can banish or
welcome home
Pity for us who fight always on the frontiers
Of the illimitable and the future
Pity our mistakes pity our sins– Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. James Wright)
We at times should ask ourselves what we mean by innovation and change. To truly innovate means to create new motivations for our actions. The pursuit of money and noteriety are the least imaginative, least individual, and innovative reasons for doing things.
It is also not very novel to seek better solutions for the same problems. Innovation requires us to create new problems, to dream up obstructions where none are seen. And not for money. Longing for money is simply a mask for fear and the desire for domination.
That said, true innovation can attract money, but the desire to do something novel in order to create better products and solutions, to enhance one’s bottom line, is not true innovation. It is merely tinkering, inventive though it may be.
We can see where some of today’s billionaires may have started out as innovators, though they have tended to end up as something quite different.
The innnovator is never the one who is rewarded. You must become something quite different first. That’s up to you.
One’s whole raison d’etre needs to be different from everyone else’s. One must speak another, unique and truly individual, language, that few will even begin to understand. It is lonely, and it is rare that it will reap vast rewards, or at least not visible rewards (there will be rewards, however, I promise you).
You should try it. Become one of the pool of lunatics that in the long run will really make a difference, though not everyone will have gotten credit for doing so. You will know, and that’s what matters.